Dear Wigleaf,

If you don't hear from me again, it's not because I don't love you anymore or because I have moved off the grid, as I threaten to do every time I get frustrated and hopeless about the current state of the world, which is, I'll admit, most days. Don't worry, I haven't put a gun to my temple or swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills either, not that the thought hasn't passed my mind. I suppose for some people thinking about suicide is wellnigh as bad as doing it, but thinking about it and not doing it has always felt to me like, if anything, an affirmation of life.

No, if you don't hear from me, it's because I've given up writing, a decision more prosaic if no less consequential, personally speaking that is.

Yesterday, the sun was shining and it was 82 degrees and mid-October. A beautiful day by any measure. I sat at my desk past nightfall watching a webcam trained upon a melting iceberg about thirty miles north of Valdez. The team of climate scientists at Princeton that monitors icebergs have dubbed it The Hemingway after the writer's theory that the real meaning of a story is submerged deep beneath the surface. You can't see it, Hemingway proposes, but you can feel it. I got up to take a shower and when I came back, The Hemingway had added 14,000 gallons of water to the sea.

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us," Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollak. Years later in a letter to Max Brod, he stated that his last request was that "Everything I leave behind me in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, is to be burned unread."

Thank God, the letter was never sent.

As I write this, I'm lying atop my sunflower duvet. The windows are open so I can hear the waves lapping at the shore. Beyond them is a foghorn that sounds like a call to prayer.

Your friend,
Thomas Heise