On and On and On

Write soon.

I almost did not write to you. Almost. I barely wrote to myself this month. I journaled almost exclusively on my phone, which I find far from ideal, and I have not found the time, in three weeks, to transcribe into my journal. In the scarcity of time, there is an enduring sense of being stretched taut and I alternate between resisting that sensation and surrendering to it.

I have much to tell you and little time to tell it. I have been thinking about goodness—and Morrison’s lecture at the Harvard Divinity School, Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination—and kindness and friendship and the quiet beauty of nighttime and dishes and the importance of reading difficult and unfamiliar and even uninteresting texts and resilience and career and work ethics and and and. You know how the letters go—on and on and on.

I enjoyed writing you the last few letters. Enjoyed, especially, their consistency. I will leave you in their company for a while. I cannot say when next I will write to you, only that it will be soon and I will be trying to write and read during that silence. A poem happened this month, the first in a while. A story is happening, steadily, in many iterations and shifting directions, to my awe and, sometimes, annoyance.

In all, I hope you are well in the home of your body.

View from the Federal High Court, while reading Amitta Forna’s Happiness.

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Write soon,

Ọbáfẹ́mi