Dear Incomprehensible Friend,
Perhaps it is a good thing that I didn’t manage to irreversibly destroy the previous letters or anything else I have written over the past year. The sense of being trapped in a dead end no longer strangles my insides, and over the past few days, I have even made some progress in my work. Not much, but still more than in quite some time.
This past week brought with it some of the coldest days I’ve experienced here, but winter’s back is already broken. At times it prowls lazily across the yard, circling slowly, and other times it flares up, growling and baring its teeth to the gums, but if you let it pass without too much grimacing, its bite strangely loses its sting. When the sky opens up above, bright and clear, the night dons its crown of stars and again preaches that same mystery of surrender that only counterintuitively reveals itself to us thick-skulled brawlers.
At the deepest, darkest nadir of the abyss, I asked for an answer or a sign, in whatever form or manifestation it might come like I have never asked before. Whether it be a familiar path or the freedom of unbroken snow, the bright light of a guiding lantern or the sheltering dark, the warmth of a persistent ember or the peace of the frozen wasteland. I want with all my being to avoid platitudes and hollow ornamental words, but if anyone understands, it is you: we are traversing through a terrain that defies all conceptualisation. Perhaps it is enough to say that in the end, the one who asks receives an answer, and so did I.
I think about how to speak of wordless speech, or how to describe a voice abiding in silence & before long I notice the moon glaring at me like one might glare at a pretender or a lunatic. I raise my hand in greeting. It acts as if it does not notice me at all. The masks of strife and woe are still all around me, but still, I feel at least some semblance of peace with them.
And as for the terrain, I finally set out in search of the mountain. On the way I passed the same brook that had greeted me when I first arrived here. I wanted to tell it everything, but it was of course frozen and muted by winter. I knew it would understand, even if we only shared the silence. I had brought with me my maps and my notes about why “every island fled away, and the mountains were not found”, but after continuing past the brook and deeper into the woodlands, I did find the mountain.
My invisible opponents are quick to anger, indignantly asking who dares call such a rocky hill a mountain, but ignoring them entirely, it rises solemn and noble in the midst of the surrounding flat woodland, at the center of the world really. The pieces of the puzzle click into their places and the coordinates align.
For a moment the snow-covered landscape throws me off, but then I locate the island I had been seeking along the nearby lake’s shore. I’m able to walk there along a thicket-lined strip of land, never once stepping onto the lake’s ice. It was never truly an island, but more of a little curled peninsula. Still, it is unmistakably the same place I remembered, the place I sought.
I linger on the shore for a while and dig out from my backpack the last bottle of summer wine from the basement. I drink half of it and invoke the memory of summer and of that verdant green hidden beneath ashen grey that once revealed itself to me. Let it forever be an island to me.
The wine hits my legs immediately, and I trudge with effort up to the summit of the mountain. I pour the other half of the bottle onto the snowy slope and think of you. It is as if I were standing on the stage of some blood ritual.
Ismeeseeteepyy! Anna meille ukkoo, joka taivaan rikkoo. Tupituimaa väkivoimaa.
Even if you are forever beyond the reach of all letters, still I write and surge forward, like a current sealed beneath thick ice.
Rettapoo aamen,
[a cipher]