The first time I called home from Russia I cried for half an hour. Thirty minutes of ugly bawling on the hard wooden bench in a phone booth at the Smolensk central post office while my father sat on the other end, speechless. He barely managed to ask, “So, how are you?” before I lost it. The pressure to talk, to connect, to make meaningful conversation before the operator cut us off was overwhelming. So was the loneliness. It was the only time I called home that year.
I never once called my girlfriend. I made excuses. It’s too expensive. It’s too complicated. The connection is terrible. Let’s stick to letters. It was 1995. There was no internet in Smolensk. No cell phones, no e-mail. Instead, I wrote her letters, double-sided on translucent air mail paper. I detailed my meals and wrote poetry. I enclosed various ephemera: ticket stubs, candy wrappers, labels peeled off of beer bottles. The occasional photo. Bits and pieces of my everyday life.
I lived in a dormitory on ulitsa Przheval’skogo, d. 31. Later she would tell me how she tried to spell out the Cyrillic letters for people: Capital-Y upside-down-capital-V period. Pi capital-P Asterix capital-E capital-B capital-A upside-down-capital-V lower-case-b capital-C capital-K O upside-down-capital-L O comma Sailboat 31. Her letters would show up in the dorm common room, Cyrillic letters staggering awkwardly across the envelope.
Even in simulated Russian her handwriting was unmistakable. She wrote in large, loopy cursive. She told me about her new job as an accompanist at a local college, about her new friends and their small dramas, about the cat she wasn’t allowed to have. She told me about her favorite professor, who happened to be the brother of a certain famous movie Sicilian (inconceivable!), and how the department worked her so hard she could barely wiggle her fingers some days.
I wrote in block capitals or a haphazard mish-mash of cursive and print. I spelled her name wrong twice in one letter, after having spelled it right just moments before. Twenty years later she still teases me about that. We filled our letters with stories and maunderings that were both too unfocused and too intense for a phone conversation.
It was a relief, in a way, that the post-Soviet postal system was so ridiculously slow. The month-long gap between letters was painful, but the ache was spread over time, not crammed into the tiny gaps between words I really wanted to say and couldn’t spit out. In my letters, not every word needed to be laden with meaning or import. I could talk about inconsequential things. I didn’t have to answer the question, “So, how are you?” She didn’t have to ask, because it was all right there, between the lines: I missed her. I loved her. I was learning a lot. I wanted to come home. I wanted to stay. I couldn’t wait to hear her voice again.
My handwriting, not hers
Christine Hanolsy 
I love this post Christine. Weathering a separation is so hard. Do you keep the letters?
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I have a huge stack of them in the attic, I think, along with other mementos from that year. I meant to use a pic of one of the air mail envelopes showing M’s handwriting, but I didn’t get my act together to crawl around up there. 🙂
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I’ve never told anyone, but I cried my first night in England. I was lucky to be able to call home more frequently than you did. I also had the luxury of email (pine mail back then). But I loved writing letters home and receiving them in return. It was a thrill to check my student mail box. I truly felt spoiled by the amount of mail I received. A letter or card was something to hold onto, to re-read. A phone call was so fleeting.
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I didn’t cry until that first phone call. It was like a dam I didn’t even know was there broke all of a sudden.
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Absolutely beautiful.
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Thanks, Michelle! It’s not at all what I started out to write, but sometimes a piece has a mind of its own…
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This was such an effortless piece, from that great opening sentence to the perfect pacing in the last few lines. It was the first thing I read this morning and I’m glad for it because it put a smile on my face. 🙂
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Wow, Emily, what a wonderful comment for *me* to start my day with. A secret: it took me a month to write this. It started out as something completely different, and I had to keep wrestling and nudging it until I was able to tease out what I was trying to say. Essays don’t come as easy to me as fiction. 🙂
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What a fabulous way to look at communication. I really think we miss that in this digital age. That way we wait for expressions of love, fullness of heart in the written word. Something gets lost in the electronic translation.
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Thanks, Shailaja! I’m a huge fan of online communication lately – partly because it connects people like us! – but I do love the tangibility of letters and the anticipation that comes every time I check my mailbox.
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really enjoyed your prose here, how you hide humor and wit (inconceivable!) amidst loneliness and longing. beautifully written.
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Thanks, Soapie! I’m pleased you liked it. It’s always ridiculously flattering to me to get positive feedback from yeah write nonfiction veterans. 🙂
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What a lovely post. 🙂
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Aww, thank you for reading it! I always love to see your name in the comments. 🙂
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I feel the same. 🙂
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It *does* look like a sailboat! This is so lovely and romantic and feels immediate, as though it wasn’t so long ago or as though you felt it and lived it so fully that you’re still able to make it feel recent. Beautifully written and heartfelt. This in itself is a love letter.
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Awww. *blush* I did marry the girl, so it’s still pretty easy to remember. 🙂
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Oh good! I guessed it must have been your wife but I wasn’t sure. I’m glad to find out it was 🙂
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