act four.

dear sonya and vanya,

thank you for letting me in tonight. tonight. i don't know where to begin except to say thank you, and that after i left your estate, your home now so devoid of ...of ....hope, i wept. all the way back to my apartment and the mine-all-mine (just this weekend) bedroom, not such a rampant mess as it was last night (this morning) but equally without love or order or hands to hold. it was really the right time to pay a visit to your russian country home - twenty-six rooms! - this, the night after stumbling into my room and collapsing into my floor covered in cast off garments and littered with sewing pins, face down with dry sobs after listening to two drunken young men pour their hearts out for a few hours. i so wish i could have helped one of them. or that one of them could have helped me. one did for a minute. when we laid on our backs as sweet as though in a field, but only in an apartment (five floors above my own), and i asked if he could see the stars and he said yes, and then said that the ceiling was painted oddly. later he was close enough to need to ask about my shampoo. head & shoulders and the finest chlorinated pool water in all of westchester county of course.

dear sonya, dear vanya, what if i am like you my whole life? "i put up with things patiently and that's how i mean to go on till my life comes to its natural end. you must be patient as well." patience will get us nowhere, and it will get us everywhere maybe too? so it's action that breaks hearts, but patience that hardens them, i suppose.

it's beautiful to think that if we suffer in this life, our next life will be radiant. but what does that matter, because our next life is not now. because that one who just walked out of your home for the last time is/was your true love. could have been. that next life doesn't matter.

"we shall bear patiently the trials fate has in store for us. we shall work for others - now and in our old age - never knowing any peace. and when our time comes we shall die without complaining. in the world beyond the grave we shall say that we have wept and suffered, that our lot was harsh and bitter, and God will have pity on us. and you and i, Uncle dear, shall behold a life which is bright and beautiful and splendid. we shall rejoice and look back on our present misfortune with feelings of tenderness, with a smile. and we shall find peace."

gosh, i believe that's called tragedy.

we shall find peace.

______________

sincerely, with windfall,

emma.