A Letter to Whoever Is Down Here

The lowest point on the route is a flat of grey shingle beside the river, forty metres above the sea, with a cairn on it no higher than my knee. I almost walked past it. Under the top stone there was a tobacco tin, rusted shut, and when I worked it open there were letters inside — eleven of them, folded small, in eleven different hands.

I will not copy them here. They were not written to me. But I can tell you that none of them said it gets better, and all of them, in one way or another, said I was here too.

I sat with them until the light went. Then I wrote this one, and put it in with the rest.

Dear you,

I don’t know your name, or what brought you this far down, or what time it is where you are. I am writing at the bottom of the map, beside a river that has no name on any sheet, and I am assuming that if you have found this, you are somewhere low too.

So, first: hello. I’m glad you are reading this. I mean that plainly.

I won’t tell you it gets better. You have heard it, and on some nights the sentence slides off you like rain off a window. I’ll tell you something smaller. The low place is a place, not a verdict. It is where you are, not what you are. It has edges, even when you cannot see them from in here.

Some things are true at forty metres, at least for me. Everything takes longer down here; that is not weakness, it is gradient. The voice that says no one would notice is very sure of itself and very often wrong — it is a forecast made from inside the fog, and fog is famous for getting distances wrong. Small things count double: a glass of water, dry socks, one paragraph of a letter from a stranger. And you are allowed to stop climbing for a while. Resting on a slope is not the same as sliding down it.

If the dark has started to talk to you about not going on — even quietly, even in passing — please don’t keep that conversation down here alone. Say it to one person. If there is no one tonight, a helpline is a person too: they answer at three in the morning so that three in the morning has someone in it. The numbers are kept lit on the lantern page. You do not have to be bad enough to call. You only have to want a voice for a while.

And if you are not there — if you are only tired, only grey, only low — that is real too, and it deserves care. You do not have to earn rest by suffering more.

I am leaving this in the tin with the others. Someone will come after you and read it. Perhaps it will be you again, on another night. If it is: you climbed out last time. The map remembers, even when you don’t.

From forty metres, beside the river,
— a fellow walker

P.S. The way up from here goes in switchbacks. At every turn it will look as though you are heading back the way you came. You aren’t.

If you want to, you can leave one too. It goes into the tin — which is to say, into your own browser. Nobody else will ever read it, and you can take it out again whenever you like.

Your letter

It stays in this browser only. No one else will read it, and you can take it out again.