I have to tell you where I was before your last letter reached me. I was somewhere good — turning over the idea that the mind doesn't end where the body does, letting myself actually believe it instead of just entertaining it as a nice thought. And then real life arrived in an envelope and pulled me back out of it. I want to go back in, so bear with me while I try.
Here's the thing I keep circling: this soul, this attention, this whatever it is that's doing the noticing right now — it doesn't feel like it belongs to one body in one city in one stretch of decades. It feels bigger than its container. Not because I'm trying to comfort myself about dying, though maybe that's part of it, but because when I actually pay attention to the size of a mind at its best — reaching backward through history, forward into questions nobody's answered yet, sideways into other people's inner lives — none of that fits inside a lifespan. It was never going to fit inside a hometown either.
No epoch is closed to a mind big enough to go looking for it.
I don't think we're built for the span we're given. I think we're built for something we mistake the span for. You know how a body spends nine months getting ready for a life it can't yet imagine — cramped, fed through someone else, unable to breathe the air it's being prepared to breathe? I think this life might be the same kind of waiting room. Not a punishment, not a tragedy — just an early, dim stage of something we're not equipped to see clearly yet from in here.
Which is why I don't want you to hold the end the way you're currently holding it — like a wall. I think it's closer to a door that's been jammed shut by nothing but your own grip on it. Everything you're afraid of losing — the skin, the specific ache in your knees, the face in the mirror — none of that was ever the part of you worth keeping. It was the wrapping. Nobody grieves wrapping paper. You let it go so you can get to the thing it was wrapped around.
I'm not asking you to stop being afraid. I got scared writing this, if I'm honest — it's one thing to admire an idea and another to actually live inside it when the lights are off and it's just you and the dark. But I keep coming back to this: if a mind can get this big just from thinking about it in a chair on an ordinary evening, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect it gets bigger, not smaller, once it's finally let out.
Still reaching, alongside you —