The first letter he writes is almost impossible to read. “I don’t even have to worry about how I phrased it,” he jokes, “because you won’t be able to figure out what it says.” She smiles and slips the thin envelope into the pocket of her bag. It’s white and flimsy: the sort that comes in 100-packs from Office Depot. He must have picked it up at work, stopping by the supply cabinet somewhere to search for the stack of envelopes—the idea of him at his desk, thinking about writing to her, makes her inexplicably glad.
It’s just a letter. Just paper and ink. But it’s not. It emits heat and light. It glows like an ember inside her bag all day long. Occasionally she reaches for it, running her finger across the envelope’s sharp edge while she’s in a meeting, just to be sure it’s there.
That night, she makes herself wait. She showers, staying in long enough that steam coats the mirror and her skin flushes a deep apple-red. Her roommate is watching an old episode of Grey’s Anatomy and she arranges herself on the couch next to her, sticking her hand into the bowl of popcorn between them. “How can you watch this?” she mumbles through a mouthful. Onscreen, Dr. McDreamy is hustling a patient on a stretcher down a hallway, shouting medical jargon at everyone in his path and calling for an IV. “Doesn’t it make you feel like you’re still at work?”
Her roommate snorts. “This is about as close to the reality of the hospital as Laguna Beach. You know in real life the surgeons are absolutely not hanging IV bags and administering meds. Hospitals are not this glamorous. I spend most of my time doing paperwork and no one has ever tried to kiss me in a supply closet. Yesterday a guy threw up on me twice though, so, there’s that.”
They watch in companionable silence until the episode ends.
“Silk Road?” her roommate asks. “Yes,” she responds vehemently. They don’t bother consulting the menu because their order never changes: dry-fried noodles, garlicky cucumber salad, and two orders of the lamb-stuffed naan. The Uyghur restaurant is their top pick for weeknight takeout — she prefers to cook most of her meals, and had never ordered delivery food once before moving into this apartment, but her roommate’s schedule is punishingly exhausting and on her nights off she takes the path of least resistance, maximizing caloric intake and minimizing effort.
The show and the food and the company are distracting but not powerful enough to make her forget about the letter. Its presence thrums like a heartbeat from the next room.
There are other letters after this one, of course. So many letters come in the months and years that follow: postcards with funny one-liners from their respective travels, birthday cards, quick hellos jotted down and tucked into pockets, extremely inappropriate hellos to read while the other is at work. Letters for big reasons. Letters for small reasons. Letters for no reason at all. Small white notes tucked into oversized vases of flowers that arrive when she’s had a particular triumph or sadness or once, when she got waited in the DMV line for over five hours and then got stuck on the T underground because of ice on the tracks and wept in public out of frustration, telling him the story as soon as she emerged into the street and found cell service, and an hour later a bouquet of sunflowers showed up at her door.
Tags on stacks of wrapped presents. Homemade Valentines. (The first time she makes him one, it takes her three days. She sits at her kitchen table all afternoon. The scent of toasted flour drifts in from the warm kitchen; she’s just pulled a pan of coconut shortbread from the oven and is letting it cool on the stovetop before she makes the lemon curd filling. On the table before her are the following things: her laptop; an empty mug which she’s about to refill for the third time that day with honeyed English breakfast tea; three markers (one red, one pink, and one gold ink); a scattered stack of papers and scissors; and the nearly finished card resting on top of it all next to an open bag of tiny bee-shaped chocolates that she’ll glue onto the front. She does briefly wonder if he’ll think it’s juvenile to receive a card made from pink construction paper, as if she’s still in second grade—but then it occurs to her that one of the nicest things about him is that he’ll probably be delighted by it.)
She leaves letters on his kitchen counter—the handwritten lines of a Timothy Liu poem; a limerick full of inside jokes; the same sentence again and again on scraps of newspaper, the corner of a grocery list, a piece of notebook paper: I love you, I love you, I love you.
Before they know each other well—before the I love yous drawn in steam on his shower door—she gives him lists of questions for the airplane every time he travels, and he returns with folded sheets of ruled paper crammed with his slanted handwriting: Do you play golf? Do you like James Bond movies? What summer job did you have? If you had to choose a perfect snack food, what would it be?
But that all comes later. This letter is the letter: the first one.
She’s always loved mail: tangible, physical letters and postcards and packages. The thrill of opening a mailbox to discover—tucked between bills and catalogues—her name and address written by hand. Her mom used to put notes in her lunchbox; her dad used to hand-draw funny Valentine’s cards in red ink on white computer paper. At summer camp, the best part of every day was the ten minutes after lunch and before rest period, when everyone would crowd on the upper porch around the open mailroom window, waiting to check their cubby. Mail from home was nice, but what they all wanted was a piece of intercamp mail, which meant you got a letter from the boys camp a mile down the road. She can still feel the tremor in her pulse when a counselor gave her a folded square with the name Caleb Asher on the front. Caleb was a lanky, curly-haired fourteen-year old who played soccer and made her legs feel strangely wobbly. His brief, laconic letters were her best approximation of romance at the time: Hey, are you watching our game on Saturday? Or I saw you sailing yesterday. Our boat capsized twice.
Her mom sends her the same package everywhere she goes, whether it’s her first real job or freshman year of college or a four-week internship working on an organic farm in Oregon: a shoebox, heavily padded, filled with bags of chocolate hazelnut biscotti. They’re made the traditional Italian way: no butter and no oil. When she crunches down on one, the crumbs flying down her shirt and onto her lap, she pictures her mom—head bent over their red KitchenAid stand mixer, beating eggs with sugar and dusting cocoa powder across the marble countertops.
Until now, she hadn’t thought a single piece of mail could top a box of homemade chocolate biscotti.
It’s been over 12 hours since he handed her the letter. Does anyone else realize how interminable this day is? The hours have been pulled and stretched like taffy—she’s sure it’s a record for the longest single day of the year.
She gets in bed. She slides a finger under the seal. She unfolds the two sheets of paper. She sees the words meeting you and rare and skinnydipping and us.
She reads the letter.
Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti
Makes about 30 biscotti
150g (1 cup) hazelnuts
120g (3/4 cup) semisweet chocolate chips or chopped chocolate
160g (3/4 cup) brown sugar
210g (1 3/4 cups) all-purpose flour
40g (1/2 cup) cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Spread the hazelnuts on a rimmed baking sheet and bake until lightly brown and fragrant, about 10 to 15 minutes (watch them closely so that they don’t burn!). Remove from the oven—and turn the oven down to 300 degrees F—and let the nuts cool. Once cool, you can rub them between a dish towel to remove the skins but I never bother because who cares! Chop the cooled nuts roughly.
Combine the chocolate chips and brown sugar in a food processor and pulse until the chocolate is in very fine bits.
Whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt in a bowl and set aside.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, mix the eggs with the vanilla until frothy-looking.
Add the brown sugar/chocolate mixture and the flour mixture and mix until it comes together as a dough. Add the toasted chopped nuts and continue to mix until well-combined, scraping down the bowl as you go.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper (I just re-use the same one from toasting the nuts).
Using wet hands, shape half of the dough into a log about 4” wide and 10” long—roughly. Repeat with the second half of the dough (the logs will spread somewhat but not drastically, so do leave a small bit of space).
Bake until the tops feel set, about 25 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool until almost room temperature. If the logs are too warm, the biscotti will crumble when you slice them—but don’t turn off the oven.
Once cooled, slice the logs into thin slices on the diagonal—how thinly you slice them is up to you: the thicker the slices, the less crispy they’ll be.
Turn the biscotti onto their sides (you’ll probably need a second baking sheet to hold all of them) and return to the oven for 15 to 20 minutes.
You can flip them halfway through but I never bother. Remove from the oven and let cool directly on the baking sheet—they’ll crisp up more as they cool.