Dear Magpie, I have something to tell you. There are several people in my life who question your motives. They think you’re trying to use me, and at first, I wondered if they were right. I’ve come to realize, however, that they’re all assholes. I know you love me, because I can feel it. But even more than that, I think you and I were meant to be together.
How does one believe in destiny without believing in God? I apologize for being such a contradiction.
One more thing. In my first letter to you, I wrote about how the smell of smoke will never leave you. My description was accurate, but incomplete.
I hope you never have to feel the carbon molecule creep, the coughing, the tiny black mushrooms floating in your lungs, sucking your oxygen, raining acrid choking soot, dust, and the dry burn of ash in the nose, blackness with not a sunny patch of grey, everything spirited to smoke that has weight, buckets of fumes that crush you, eclipsing all light, pinching your nostrils and taping your face shut, parts of the world now living inside you, under your eyelids, in your rasping and charred throat, stealing more oxygen so you can’t breathe in, burning plastic singeing, killing cells, turning you into a piece of smoke, coughing, choking, absorbing the physical world one element at a time, blinding tears that taste like wood, making memories, building sediment cakes inside you, making memories, can’t exhale because more smoke will come in, flavouring your hair, making memories, staining you the colour of all things, raking heat through your chest, feels like gravel and baked blood, killing tissue, this horrible synthesis of elements forcing you to grow as a person, to change, the most wonderful thing there is ... how could you have missed it all this time?
Dear Magpie, smoke is the gift of memory. A fire at St Mary’s would give us so much to remember. Think of the altarpiece burning for days, plumes and plumes of gold paint blackening the sky over all Kraków. It would be such a sight, or as you say, it would be “ekstra.” How else could we possibly preserve all that we’ve been through?
How would it live on?
Please reconsider the plan.
That’s all for now. Sorry you got this letter so late. I didn’t have a stamp.
Your Radeki