Knox
“I’m gonna write you these long, flowery, old-timey letters like Civil War soldiers wrote back home,” I say. “My dearest Sylvie—”
“Dearest, beautiful Sylvie.”
“Yes. Sorry. My dearest, beautiful Sylvie—”
“Hang on.” Sylvie hands me her phone with Spotify open. “Search ‘Ken Burns Civil War.’ Then just pick a song from the soundtrack at random.”
“Are you going to let me finish this joke?”
“Do you want to tell the best joke you can or do you just want to tell a joke?”
“Obviously the best I can.”
“Then obey me.”
I do. Plaintive fiddle music weeps from the speakers.
“Perfect.” Sylvie beckons me to continue.
“My dearest, beautiful Sylvie. How I have laid awake at night pining after thee, my little sunflower—laid or lain?”
“I guess ‘lain’ sounds slightly better.”
“More old-timey, huh? People are always trying to get laid but never lain.”
“Wow. That’s really so true. Anyway, finish your letter.”
“Uh . . .”
“You left off at ‘my little sunflower.’”
“Right. My little sunflower. How I dream of you—”
“Wait, dream?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t you just say you were lying awake at night? Hence our whole conversation about laid and lain?”
The fiddle music gives way to sad banjo music.
“Okay, well I keep getting interrupted,” I say. “Hard to keep my train of thought.”
“I just want your old-timey letter home to be internally consistent. Isn’t that the least it should be if some Pony Express guy has to risk his life and hemorrhoids to deliver it to me?”
“You are one hell of a tough customer.”
“No, we’ve already established that I’m a little sunflower. You know, I’m starting to genuinely enjoy this sad banjo music. Like unironically.”
“I’m daydreaming, okay?”
“At night?”
I slap my forehead with my palm and swipe my hand slowly down my face. “It sounded better than ‘lying awake at night with spiraling thoughts.’”
“Did they have spiraling thoughts in the old-timey days?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“I dunno—it’s hard to imagine, like, Davy Crockett lying awake in a log cabin and doomscrolling.”
“What’s doomscrolling?” I ask.
“When you pick a social media platform and read post after post that puts you in a worse mood. Preferably forty-five minutes after you should have gone to sleep.”
“Maybe Davy Crockett would light a candle and put on his coonskin cap and open the Bible to doomscroll the Book of Revelation and be like ‘uh-oh, dragon with seven heads—don’t like the sound of that. Oh crap, demon with the mark of the Beast on his forehead—that ain’t good.’”
“Is that what’s going on in the Bible?!”
“Never read it?”
Sylvie shrugs. “I mean . . . I have doomscrolling.”
“You know what’s funny? I think the Book of Revelation talks about scrolls.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s exactly the kind of thing that would be there.”
We laugh and then we’re quiet for a mile or two.
“I’m gonna miss you,” Sylvie says.
“I’ve already said that in the letter, but in a more poetic way.”
“Not the letter. I mean I’m really going to miss you. Genuinely and unironically.”
“The way you like the sad banjo music?”
“Exactly.”
“I’m the sad banjo music of people?”
“Kinda, yeah.”