for Maya and Theo, with love
“A bundle of letters, tied with twine — written by the people who love them and bound for the morning of the fourteenth.”
12 letters in the bundle · untie the twine and read each one.
My darling boy, and my new darling girl — I have been keeping a small box in the airing cupboard of every letter Theo ever wrote me from school. Maya, you have, in one quiet year, added more pages to that box than the fourteen years before you. Welcome to the bundle, both of you. We are unreasonably lucky.
Maya — your father and I knew on the third Sunday lunch with Theo. He helped clear the plates, asked your grandmother three questions about Lagos, and then sat on the back step with you in the rain for an hour. You did not see us watching from the kitchen window. Now you know. Happy Valentine's, my love.
Maya, Theo — I have married, by now, more than three hundred couples. The vow I remember from yours is Theo's: I will be kind to you on the days it is hardest to be kind. I told my husband about it that evening. He said: about time someone said it. Many happy returns of the day, both of you. — M.
Maya, I have been your sister for thirty-one years and your bridesmaid for one. I will tell you what I told Theo on the morning of the wedding: she will, occasionally, be wrong. She will never tell you so. You will have to spot it. (He spotted it. We saw.) Love you both, always. — P.
Theo, I knew you when you couldn't cook an egg and your idea of a romantic gesture was lending someone your last clean shirt. Look at you now, with a proper kitchen and a proper wife, on the morning of Saint Valentine's. The shirt thing, for the record, was also genuinely romantic. Maya — welcome to the bundle.
Maya, mon coeur — I taught you Baudelaire and you taught me, two summers later in a small café on Rue de Buci, that the best translations are not the most faithful, they are the most loving. You have always known this. Theo, you are loved by a translator. Take it as the compliment it is. Bonne Saint-Valentin.
Mai — I was nine when you were born and I am still convinced I had something to do with it. You are the closest thing I have to a younger sister. Theo, I have already approved you. (You are welcome.) Happy Valentine's, you two. The bundle is rude in its loveliness. — H.
Maya, Theo — from the front door across the road. We were, briefly, alarmed when the young couple moved in. We were, within a week, charmed. The kettle is always on at ours; we have decided, unilaterally, that you are part of the street now. Happy Saint Valentine's. The flowers in the window were yours, weren't they. Thank you. — T & E.
Theo — you were the older brother who let me lose at chess, which is, I now realise, much harder than letting me win. Maya — I have watched my brother become someone I want to be more like. That, I think, is the whole thing. Love you both. Happy Valentine's.
From two people who have, between us, eaten more meals at your kitchen table than at our own — happy Saint Valentine's, you pair. The bundle is exactly the kind of thing the two of you would do. We are coming over Thursday. Bring nothing. We have the wine.
Mayita — we were twenty-two and convinced love was something dramatic that happened in a different city. You have, with Theo, quietly disproved every single one of our theories. Saint Valentine's, mia cara — to you both, with the kind of love that does the washing up.
Mate. I have known you since we were nineteen and bad at almost everything. I have watched you become a man who is — and I do not say this lightly — calm in a room with a baby. Maya did that, partly. The rest you did yourself, slowly, because Maya was watching. Happy Valentine's, you ridiculous, soft, lovely pair.
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
“Untie the twine slowly. There is no hurry. The letters have been here all along.”
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