Looking for the Empty
Not long ago, I pulled a cigar box filled with letters from two men that has been stored in the back of my closet for a long time. Many of the letters were mailed to me from Dublin and London in tissue-thin airmail envelopes, but many others were sent from just across town. Isn’t it extraordinary to think that there was a time not so long ago that we routinely communicated in physical love letters, handwritten, stamped, and dropped in the mail? I’ve reread them so many times, and they are heavy with every possible kind of emotion and drama—love, hate betrayal, disappointment, passion, bitterness, hope, forgiveness, sorrow, ecstasy. In between all that is ordinary worry about money, thoughts about the books we were reading, pleas to hurry home, plans to meet. The box I keep them in is covered with thick layers of images I collected and glued down until it became a kind of urn that held the remains of dead love affairs. It’s odd that people have been born who will never spend hours writing love letters and then watching for the mailman every day, hoping for a reply.
As much as I hated that delay between sending and receiving, I’ve come to think of that empty space between letters not as dead time but charged instead with energy and emotion, the silence an integral part of the interchange between us.
I thought of those letters when I started reading recently about the Japanese concept of Ma, a pause in time, an interval of no action which is necessary for growth to happen. It’s a pause that is full of possibility, but now that we communicate through email or texts, we expect an almost instant response. We hate waiting and view it as rudeness or a brushoff when someone doesn’t reply right away. I’m guilty of giving in to this impatient need for instant gratification, just as I often hurry to fill in silences in a conversation and step on the end of friends’ sentences or finish them myself. I’m not a Luddite, but I’m trying to wrap my literal Western mind around Ma and make more room for it in my life. It’s paradoxical that the pandemic has been an opportunity for me to do that, but as I reenter the world--the busy, loud, competitive world—it will be harder to cultivate. But I’ve started writing postcards instead of always texting a hello, I’m keeping cable news turned off all day now that Trump isn’t stirring up trouble 24/7, and I’m sitting in silence more often. I’m taking baby steps to find my Ma.
Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.