Her mother was gone that evening.
Don’t panic, Iris told herself as she stood in the quiet flat. Over and over, she thought those words. Like a record playing on a phonograph.
Aster would be home soon. Occasionally she stayed late at a club, drinking and dancing. But she always returned when the money ran out or the establishment closed at midnight. There was no need to panic. And she had promised Iris that she was going to be better. Perhaps she wasn’t at a club at all but trying to get her old job back at the Revel Diner.
Yet the worry remained, pinching Iris’s lungs every time she breathed.
She knew how to tamp down the anxious feelings that were boiling within her. It was currently hiding beneath her bed—the typewriter her Nan had once created poetry with. The typewriter Iris had inherited and had since been using to write to This isn’t Forest.
She left the front door unlocked for her mother and carried a candle into her room, where she was surprised to find a piece of paper lying on her floor. Her mysterious pen pal had written again, even though she had yet to respond to their myth-filled letter.
She was beginning to wonder if they were from another time. Perhaps they had lived in this very room, long before her. Perhaps they were destined to live here, years from now. Perhaps their letters were somehow slipping through a fissure of time, but it was this place that was causing it.
Iris retrieved the paper and sat on the edge of her bed, reading:
Do you ever feel as if you wear armor, day after day? That when people look at you, they see only the shine of steel that you’ve so carefully encased yourself in? They see what they want to see in you—the warped reflection of their own face, or a piece of the sky, or a shadow cast between buildings. They see all the times you’ve made mistakes, all the times you’ve failed, all the times you’ve hurt them or disappointed them. As if that is all you will ever be in their eyes.
How do you change something like that? How do you make your life your own and not feel guilt over it?
While she was reading it a second time, soaking in their words and pondering how to respond to something that felt so intimate it could have been whispered from her own mouth, another letter came over the threshold. Iris stood to fetch it, and that was the first time she truly tried to envision who this person was. She tried, but they were nothing more than stars and smoke and words pressed on a page.
She knew absolutely nothing about them. But after reading something like this, as if they had bled themselves on the paper … she longed to know more.
She opened the second letter, which was a hasty:
I sincerely apologize for bothering you with such thoughts. I hope I didn’t wake you. No need to reply to me. I think it helps to type things out.
Iris knelt and reached for her typewriter beneath the bed. She fed a fresh sheet of paper into the roller and then sat there, staring at its possibilities. Slowly, she began to type, her fingers meeting the keys. Her thoughts began to strike across the page:
I think we all wear armor. I think those who don’t are fools, risking the pain of being wounded by the sharp edges of the world, over and over again. But if I’ve learned anything from those fools, it’s that to be vulnerable is a strength most of us fear. It takes courage to let down your armor, to welcome people to see you as you are. Sometimes I feel the same as you: I can’t risk having people behold me as I truly am. But there’s also a small voice in the back of my mind, a voice that tells me, “You will miss so much by being so guarded.”
Perhaps it begins with one person. Someone you trust. You remove a piece of armor for them; you let the light stream in, even if it makes you wince. Perhaps that is how you learn to be soft yet strong, even in fear and uncertainty. One person, one piece of steel.
I say this to you knowing full well that I am riddled with contradictions. As you’ve read in my other letters, I love my brother’s bravery, but I hate how he’s abandoned me to fight for a god. I love my mother, but I hate what booze has done to her, as if it’s drowning her and I don’t know how to save her. I love the words I write until I soon realize how much I hate them, as if I am destined to always be at war within myself.
And yet I keep moving forward. On some days, I’m afraid, but most days, I simply want to achieve those things I dream of. A world where my brother is home safe, and my mother is well, and I write words that I don’t despise half of the time. Words that will mean something to someone else, as if I’ve cast a line into the dark and felt a tug in the distance.
All right, now I’ve let the words spill out. I’ve given you a piece of armor, I suppose. But I don’t think you’ll mind.
She sent the letter over the threshold, telling herself not to expect a reply. At least, not for a little while.
Iris began to work on her essay, trying to sense the shape of it. But her attention was on her wardrobe door, on the shadows that lined the threshold and the stranger who dwelled beyond it.
She paused to check the time. It was half past ten at night. She considered leaving the flat to search for her mother. The worry was a nagging weight in her chest, but Iris wasn’t sure where she should go. If it would be safe for her to walk alone this late at night.
She’ll return soon. Just like she always does. When the clubs close at midnight.
A letter passed through the portal, bringing her back to the present.
Iris reached for it. The paper crinkled in her fingers as she read:
One person. One piece of armor. I’ll strive for this.
Thank you.
