An email arrived on Tuesday at 09:12, which is the time reserved for things drafted the night before. The name in the sender line was a name I have not said out loud in twenty-five years. I put the phone face down and descaled the kettle, which needed doing, and which I mention because it is important to me that you know the kettle genuinely needed doing.
Daniel. There is no way to write around it, so there it is. Daniel, of the house in Zone 3 with one working phone socket and a kitchen that was never once clean in the two years I lived in it. Daniel of the futon, the CD wallet with the felt-tip spines, the sash window we smoked out of because the landlord had views. We were twenty-two. We were not quite together. This was a category we invented and then defended, at length, to anyone who asked, and the vigour of the defending was of course the whole answer, and we were the last two people in the house to know it.
The subject line said "Long time." I want it noted that I did not open it for four hours, and that this was not composure. I would like credit for the four hours. I am aware that counting them undermines the claim. It was a meeting, then a second meeting, then a period of standing in the kitchen holding the phone the way you hold something you have been handed at a funeral.
The email itself had the structure I have written about before — the structure of the letters that arrive at this column, the structure of what women say at four o'clock. There is the sat-down email, and then there is a paragraph break, and then there is the actual email. The sat-down part was immaculate. He had seen something I wrote. He hoped I was well. A wife was mentioned with the tenderness of long habit; two children were mentioned as logistics, one at university, which I had to read twice, because the last time I checked, we were at university, give or take.
Then the break. I have said it before: you can see the paragraph break coming from a long way off, like weather.
Below it, he wrote that he had spent March clearing his mother's house. That she had kept things — everyone's mothers kept things, apparently, this is what we are all discovering at once, an entire generation opening drawers — and that in one of them he had found a photograph from the house. All six of us in the garden that wasn't a garden. And me, he said, at the end of the row, laughing at something out of frame, and he had stood in his mother's emptied bedroom and found that he could not remember what the thing out of frame was, and that this — not the house, not the drawer, not even his mother, quite — was what had undone him. So he had looked me up. He thought I would want to know the photograph existed. That was all. He didn't ask for anything. The best ones never do; I have built a small column on this observation.
Here is the part I keep returning to on the bus. He wrote to the woman at the end of the row. He asked if I still wrote everything down in notebooks I then lost, whether I still took coffee in that way he never stopped finding funny. I do. Until Tuesday I had this filed under personality rather than evidence. He addressed, in other words, a twenty-two-year-old, care of this address, and the twenty-two-year-old is — this is the inconvenient part — still here to read it. She keeps the notebooks now. That is the only real difference I could put my hand to, and I looked for a while.
I would like to report that I have been more evolved about him than he has been about me. I have not. The Daniel I hold is also twenty-two, permanently, mid-argument about a band, wrong. He has been mid-argument for twenty-five years. Somewhere in that time he acquired a wife, a mortgage presumably, a child old enough to be at university, and a dead mother, and I had updated none of it, because we do not update the people from that year. We keep them as they were and we call it memory, and it is closer to taxidermy, done with love.
I am not going to reply straightaway. I have drafted four replies.
The first was witty. I deleted it; it was auditioning. The second was warm, and read, on the second pass, like a card you'd buy in a garden centre. The third was news — a tidy account of the intervening decades — and it was a CV, and nobody has ever wanted a CV. The fourth is two sentences long. I wrote it at ten past three in the morning, an hour I have recently begun keeping without having applied for it. It has been sitting in drafts since Thursday, which is not the same thing as unsent.
I mentioned it to Margaret. She asked whether he'd aged well. I said I had no idea, the email didn't say. She said that was the correct sort of email, and went back to the crossword.
He did not want anything. He wanted to put the photograph down somewhere it would be read and not made into a conversation. To say here and not here, because. I have spent four months writing about that transaction as though I were its clerk rather than its customer.
I will send the fourth draft. There is no rush. We have, after all, been twenty-five years about it.
— Charlie is not nostalgic. She has simply kept everything. She would like that noted in perpetuity.