The Letter

You’ve been wronged.

You’re a writer. What do you do?

You write The Letter.

Writing letters is good—as cathartic as crooning a Taylor Swift ballad in a crowded noriebang. (Noriebang = Korean singing room.)

Sending such letters is bad. You (generally) observe a time-tested rule: Write the letter. Don’t send it.

So you write it, select your words, hone the craft. This you can do. Alliterative phrases come trippingly off the tongue, phrases such as “cowardly cad”. Ah, but—tongue between teeth to quell your glee—you don’t write that. Not that.

Finished. It is a thing of beauty, this letter. Each word glistens like a solitary star in a pristine galaxy far, far away…

Yet it is bitter. But you like it because it is bitter, and because it is your heart. (You toss silent, heart-felt apologies to Stephen Crane.)

You don’t send the letter. Remember: write the letter; don’t send it.

Or do you?

In this case, your words are so apropos, so carefully hewn, and your true desire is not to injure the injurious party—nay, in your heart you know your letter can edify, can, in fact, perform a necessary duty, is indeed an unselfish and disinterested gesture on your part, even a magnanimous one. For the recipient may be wholly unaware of his cowardly caddiness and may not wish to be caddy in the cowardly sense. He can reform. He will be grateful.

The letter must find its home. The rule must be broken.

You enlist the support of your intimates. Your family demurs. Your spouse, casting a dead-eye stare, dares to intimate you penned the letter for your own perverse pleasure.

Not so. If ever a letter was needed to guide, to inform, to edify… Ah, this one is the exception, surely? You plead your case. You fail.

And yet. This is the funny part. You do actually have to send a letter of sorts, for this CC has your stuff and you want your stuff back.

The body will be: This is to inform you…You like the quasi-legal tone. Between the hours of…So deliciously dictatorial.

Dispense with a salutation, eschewing “Dear”. There is nothing dear about him.

The letter is terse. In the history of epistles never breathed more pregnant a subtext. This is to inform you…

How to end said letter? Which valedictory: Regards? No, you feel no regard. With Malice Aforethought? Hmmm, perhaps not.

You cannot dispense with a closing of sorts. You never quite embraced that nihilist post post post modernist dictum nothing is all. Or was it all is nothing? Finally, you settle on Sincerely. After all, you are sincere in your disapprobation.

Following the dispatch of this terse missive, you write your blog post. Naturally, in second person since you’ve yearned to experiment ever since reading Pam Houston’s stellar story ‘How to Talk to a Hunter.” In your post you use the pronoun he—not in the he-is-meant-to-represent-both-genders nonsense you must reject as a confirmed feminist, but in the literal he, knowing that canny readers, in their inexorable search for CC’s identity, can now narrow possible offenders to a mere 3.45 billion candidates, give or take.