Some Postcards I Never Sent

“You can’t wait for the world to be perfect to write. You’d be waiting forever.”

March 10, 2025

I was at my desk in New York City writing this weekend and looked over at a box that had sat there for some time—a year, two, maybe more. The box was full of postcards collected over the last 30-some years. I still collect them. The impulse comes at the end of a museum show, a tourist excursion, standing in line by the restroom in a restaurant or a club, and I select a card for the way the image feels pinned somehow to the moment, an anchor.

I rarely ever had the impulse to send them to anyone, is the thing—they were for me. I laid the cards out impulsively on the floor to see them.

Some of these cards were written to me. I’d thought they were somewhere else but instead found them here in the box: a postcard a teacher had written to chastise me for only applying to two MFA programs (I applied to a third after reading it). A postcard from my late mentor Kit Reed, repurposing a flyer for her husband’s art show, and congratulating me on the debut issue of Out Magazine back in 1991. I was seized with love for her that she had loved it enough to write to me—I’d forgotten that. And there was the card my friend Shauna Seliy sent me, postmarked May 21, 1999, of the Karl Friedrich Schinkel painting of the entrance The Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, a card I taped to my wall like so many of these, and which set off the chain of connections and associations that became my second novel, The Queen of the Night. On the back, Shauna had written, “Once you catch your bear it will dance for you.” A Macedonian Proverb.

I often think of getting it tattooed on my arm but maybe in cursive, so not everyone will read it.

Some of the cards were written to friends or family and I had never sent them and I thought for a while about why this would be. They didn’t have dates usually but they described events from the 1990s, when I’d moved back to New York after graduate school. I had the memory of deciding I needed to send people a few cards, and so for a while I would get multiples of some cards in an attempt to be a better correspondent. The idea was that I’d have one to keep and others to send. But I still have the multiples, and these cards I wrote but never sent.

Laid out on the floor, the cards felt like a message for me from the person I used to be. And there were certainly messages to me in the cards I wrote and never sent also, more direct, less metaphoric. Some were from the time that I was “against love,” as I said. I told or really didn’t tell those friends about these feelings. One card signaled to a possible lover that I was in fact interested in the relationship, but I never sent it—I just wasn’t ready. One card seemed to be written just to me, on one of those postage paid postcards. Underneath it, a card with a drawing of my bare feet in blue ink.

On another, half of a message to an old friend in which I congratulated him on making a decision about leaving a disappointing school job and which mentioned a care package I never sent also. I knew I hadn’t sent it because the message had most likely embarrassed me. I’d described my own despair at the the sexism, homophobia and racism, the economic difficulties that had hurt my mother, the pandemic which was killing our friends, and endangering us, and how I felt like I just couldn’t write also, which made everything worse.

I am unsure of a lot of things right now, the things that have always held me up and that are crashing away: family, friends, my ability to write… In the face of so many scary things, congratulations on finding the bravery to live as you need to live.

This friend is also a writer, I should say, and we have seen each other through a great deal in this life. I wondered if I would tell him about it. But mostly I thought of how these times were like those times, if also worse. I had just gotten caught up on the illegal seizure and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, who was taken by ICE despite having a green card, with the apparent help of his school, Columbia University, and at the direction of the President of the United States. The Trump administration claimed they have the right to strip him of that card without the due process he is required to go through by law because of his role in the protests at Columbia, negotiating for the encampment—he is not accused of breaking any laws. His wife is 8 months pregnant and was threatened with arrest as she sought news of him. His case is an intensification of the persecution of Palestinians and student activists even as it is also the beginning of the Trump administration’s attempt to deny us all of our rights if they don’t like our politics, our ethnicity, our gender expression, or sexuality. A federal judge has already blocked Khalil’s further removal but we are where we are because they didn’t seem to fear the courts.

As a part of researching this new novel, I have been reading my old blogs, and was now on my posts from 2007, back when I thought George W. Bush was the worst it would get, for how he just broke the law all the time, or his friends did, and they all expected to be rewarded for it. But this road goes back farther than that. When I get to the place I was in when I wrote that, I think of something my friend Shauna, the friend who sent me the Queen card, said back sometime in the 1990s, and I paraphrase:

“You can’t wait for the world to be perfect in order to write. You’d be waiting forever.”

*

After I laid the cards out on the floor, I was thinking of how I might see them on a wall. I saw how the cards were like the pieces of a self portrait, found over decades, across countries and cities and small nothing junk shops on the side of the road in some town I’d never get back to. A self portrait I had to find by wandering and not knowing where I was going. The fascinations of a moment or a lifetime, I wouldn’t know until more time passed. There are over a dozen of James Dean, for example, and at least two of Elizabeth Taylor. Jewels, Naked men. Owls, Divas and models, monsters and heroes. One is a stereoscope of a Chinese man. One is an early portrait of Naomi Campbell. A favorite is of the late artist Jerome Caja, who I remember wore a pin that said I’m sorry I don’t speak English on his Members Only jacket in case strangers started yelling at him about his drag and got close enough to him to read it. He would just point at it.

Eventually the floor became crowded and I let it. I had been writing a scene in the new novel where the narrator doesn’t want someone who has come over for sex into his bedroom. He doesn’t want to explain himself to his guest but then he tries to understand himself afterward. I imagined his wall of cards there, in the bedroom, like I once had my own, and then wrote it into the novel. And while it wasn’t why I was in the city last weekend it was really important that it happened.

It reminded me in a good way of something in my first novel, Edinburgh. I wrote a Tarot reading into the novel, one given by one character to another, and then drew the cards myself. The reading determined the novel’s end. It felt like that.

*

And then it was time for dinner with my old friend, as I had made plans with him coincidentally. I told him about the card at dinner and invited him to come and see it if he wanted; it seemed almost like an ambush to bring it to the restaurant.

And after I gave it to him and he read it, and I apologized, he said, “We have all written this card, baby, and I don’t mean to make you seem any less exceptional by saying that,” and then he hugged me close, and we both wept.

Good luck to us all right now.

Alexander Chee