Sunday January 3, 2016
Dear Virginia,
First, forgive me for writing. I’m certain that you have better things to occupy yourself with in the Great Void than my silly letters. However, I have addressed my queries to various beings, consulted great works on this Earthly plane, found all responses lacking, and thus I turn to you, wherever you are.
I fear I am not mad at all. I find myself at this moment in time, after years and years, decades really, of discomfort, exceptionally comfortable. Happy isn’t the word, and fulfilled does not come close, but I can see now—in a way that was previously unimaginable to me—how a life of basic and reasonable comfort can lead an artist, a writer, a women to give up, and accept the dull drone of any number of acceptable days until death finds her. Is this why you killed yourself?
I have never considered myself ambitious. But once I was motivated. Now, there is no force outside of myself to spur me on to create or try or put on pants. Once you get comfortable, you forget to how to want for something. I want to want more. But that’s as far as I can get. Is it age? I’m not that old. Is it the recognition that I’ve achieved about as much as I ever will? Perhaps, I have. Am I just tired? I am.
I thought that I wanted to write a book. But now that there is nothing much in my way, I do not. I have a room of my own. I have some money. I have to work for it. That takes up a fair amount of my time, but not all. I have some time. I have time. I have a desk and if not a view, something to look at. What am I lacking? Is it the lack of lack that’s lacking in me? Do I have too much? Can just enough be too much?
I’ve read The Voyage Out. It’s really terrible. You went on to do better things, but I worry that I’ll never even manage to spit out a real mess like that. Everyone says, just start, one bird, volumes of unhelpful advice. All the little things of life. The need for toothpaste. Pay a bill. You didn’t have television.
At a job interview for a really miserable position in Career Services, they asked me, who living or dead, do you most admire and why? I said you. A suicide. I did not get the job. And that’s another thing you’ve saved me from.
You published your first book at 33. I’ll be the same age in six months time. Gauntlet thrown.
Yours &c., Sacha
Sacha Siskonen works in an abandoned hospital. She writes because she cannot afford to do anything else. Her work can be found in that vast, perplexing realm known commonly as the internet.
Virginia Woolf is dead.