A small project, kept quiet —
We started this on a Sunday in January, sitting at the kitchen table with the heating on too high and a stack of envelopes that, between them, had outlived more relationships than ours. The idea was simple. Eleven of us, the people who have stood closest to Maya and Theo through the last decade, would each write a letter — by hand, on real paper — and one of us would type the lot up and bind them into a bundle for the morning of the fourteenth.
We did not tell them. The two of them are, between them, very bad at being surprised — Maya cries instantly, Theo always notices the thing you tried to hide — so the trick was to keep the bundle entirely out of the house. It has lived, for six weeks, in the bottom drawer of Catherine's desk, beneath a folder marked "tax — 2022."
What is in the bundle is the version of the two of them we have been allowed to see — the kitchen on Tuesdays, the back step in the rain, the year in Florence, the morning of the wedding, the dog. The letters are not in any particular order. The wax seals are real. The twine came from the haberdasher on the corner who, when we explained what we were doing, refused to let us pay for it.
Maya, Theo — happy Saint Valentine's. The bundle is yours now. Untie the twine slowly. We love you.
With all our love —
the family, and the ones who feel like it