‘Revere’ by Esmé Weijun Wang​​

It’s a new year, which means (some) fresh energy and (some) fresh perspective. Clocking our emotional cycles to a mostly arbitrary calendar is a bit weird, but it’s how we’re presently wired.

‘Revere,’ a short story by Esmé Weijun Wang in Lenny Letter, is a rather somber piece to write about in light of the new-year dynamic of refresh and renew, but it hit me hard and it’s taken a few weeks to wrap my mind around why, exactly.

The memories we hold, the non-physical things that give shape to our emotional realities that are housed in our bodies, are nonlinear. We live and relive people and places and things, constantly, whether we know it or now. A hurt from childhood, a trauma from an adult relationship, disappointment and joy and expectation—they’re not physical things, but, they sort of are.

This is a roundabout way of saying ‘Revere’ is about love and loss and how these things shape us continually whether we want to or not. A brief but incandescent love affair, wherever it ends up, is embedded in our weather systems. We might experience the same storms (love, loss, etc), but we erode and regrow differently. We can compare our landmasses to each other, but the soil is different, the air different.

Here is when the narrator realizes she’s fallen for Ellie:

And that is the moment I think of when I think of how I met Ellie — not the shock of blood, or the wet skirt that clung to her legs, but our reflections in the mirror when she looked, and how our eyes met when she saw me looking.

What’s so powerful about this story is how, within a straightforward framework, such a deep emotional reality is created. There are questions that aren’t answered and don’t need to be answered, because our own experiences and wishes and disappointments fill in the rest, forwards and backwards.

Here’s hoping your new year includes growth in as many directions as possible.

Lenny Letter