I opened the top one at the table. When I read the first line of what my great-aunt had hidden in that cabinet all those years, I had to put it down, because it was addressed to me by name, and she wrote it in 1974, and I was not born until 1981.
There are fifty-two of them.
She started on her thirtieth birthday and wrote one every year on the same day until she was eighty-one. Sealed every one, mailed none. She addressed them to whoever ended up with the cabinet, except that somewhere in the early eighties she stopped writing whoever and started writing my name.
She picked me at four years old and never said a word about it for the next thirty-five years.
The first line of the top letter, which is the last one she wrote, in October of 2019:
Well, Jeremy, you got the cabinet, so either I judged you right or your mother made you take it. Start at the bottom. I was thirty and I did not know one thing, and I would rather you met me in that order.
I did what she said. I went to the bottom.
1974 is a woman turning thirty in a rented room in Norfolk, working at a bank, in love with somebody her family would not have in the house, writing it out because there was nobody she could say it to. It is not a diary. She is talking to a person. She asks questions and answers them a year later.
1977 is the year she did not marry him. 1981 is the year I was born and she wrote three pages about holding me. 1994 she was angry about something my grandfather said and there are two sentences in there I will not be repeating to anybody. 2004 is her hip. 2011 is the year she says outright that she had made her peace with never having been anybody’s mother, and then she takes it back in 2012.
I am reading one a year. That was not her instruction. That is a decision I made in February, sitting with all fifty-two spread out on my table like a hand of cards I could not stop looking at.
I have read eleven. I am on 1985. I have forty-one birthdays of that woman left and I intend to still be reading them when I am seventy.
My mother and my aunt have read all of them. They could not do it my way and I did not ask them to.
The cabinet is in my hallway. Same as her hallway. The false row is the third one down and I put the rest of them back behind it.
My daughter is six. She has already been told not to go rifling through the little drawers, in those exact words, and she already knows which row is fake, because six-year-olds always do.
A woman spent fifty-two years writing to somebody who did not exist yet, and then existed, and then grew up and got the cabinet. She never once asked me a personal question at Christmas. She had been telling me everything since before I was born and she just did not want to be in the room for it.