Completely in the Dark

I haven’t wanted to write this, even as far back as last July, when I first added it to the edit slate.

So I yanked it, worried about “getting it wrong.”

Then it popped up after New Year’s, while I was searching through 1982–83 letters for topics.

There it was again—my monster—on the page.

The memory had been easily forgotten, since there’s no journal for 1983.

“I’ve not been in a ‘people’ mood lately,” reads the aforementioned page—a copy of a letter to Lindsay Clarke written on Sept. 7, 1983 (photo at left probably taken early that year, in Dad’s den at the farm, likely prior to the Guthrie date with Thérèse).

“I’m finding fault in everyone and trying hard not to say anything out loud. Let me explain.”

I’d returned to Minnesota from Britain feeling more lonely than I’d ever been, moreso after Thérèse and…