Vox Meditantis

15th November, 1922
Mrs. Murphy’s Boarding House
147 Hester Street, New York

My Dearest Henry,

The autumn winds have stripped the last stubborn leaves from the sycamore outside my window, and I find myself counting the days since your last letter arrived—forty-three, to be precise. Forty-three days of watching the postman’s familiar silhouette pass beneath the gaslight without so much as a glance towards our weathered door. I wonder if Colorado has frozen your heart as thoroughly as it has apparently frozen your pen.

How bitterly ironic that I should write to you on this particular evening, when the factory girls next door are preparing for another dance at Roseland, their laughter spilling through these paper-thin walls like champagne bubbles. They speak of suitors and Saturday night promises, whilst I sit here with ink-stained fingers, writing to a ghost who once promised me golden mountains and a life far grander than this cramped room that smells perpetually of Mrs. Murphy’s boiled cabbage and broken dreams.

Do you remember, Henry, how you held my hands that final evening at Castle Garden? Your calloused palms were warm against mine as you swore that the silver mines of Leadville would make us rich enough to marry within the year. “Wait for me, Alice,” you whispered, your breath forming clouds in the February cold. “I’ll send for you before the snow melts.” Well, dearest, the snow has melted twice over, and still I remain here, sewing buttonholes for Goldstein’s factory by day and mending stockings by gaslight, saving every precious penny for a train ticket that may never be needed.

The bitter truth, which sits in my chest like a stone, is that I have become quite accomplished at waiting. I wait for letters that arrive less frequently than Christmas. I wait for promises that grow thinner with each passing season. I wait whilst other girls marry shopkeepers and clerks, settling for certainty over the intoxicating possibility of love that blazes like a comet and disappears just as quickly.

Yet still, in the treacherous hours before dawn, when the city finally quiets and I can hear my own thoughts above the eternal clamour of progress, I find myself aching for you with a longing so profound it steals my breath. I close my eyes and summon the memory of your laugh—that rich, rumbling sound that used to make the pushcart vendors on Orchard Street turn their heads. I remember how you would describe the Colorado sky, vast and unmarked by tenement shadows, where a person could breathe freely and dream without apology.

Perhaps it is foolish of me to harbour such tender feelings for a man who has become little more than a memory wrapped in tissue paper and stored away like Mother’s good china. Yet what else am I to do with this heart that refuses to learn sense? The other girls speak of “modern” love, of independence and suffrage, of not needing a man to complete one’s happiness. But they have never known what it means to love someone whose absence creates a Henry-shaped hollow in every room, every sunset, every song that drifts from the gramophone in Tessie O’Brien’s flat downstairs.

I have grown bitter, my darling, bitter as the coffee grounds I save and re-use until they yield nothing but brown water. Bitter at circumstance, at distance, at the cruel mathematics of poverty that keep us apart. But beneath that bitterness runs a current of such fierce longing that sometimes I fear it will sweep away what little common sense I have left.

Mrs. Murphy’s nephew Patrick has been calling on Sundays. He works for the trolley company and has steady prospects, a neat moustache, and hands that have never known the bite of mountain cold. He speaks kindly to me and brings peppermints for the children. A sensible girl would encourage his attentions. A sensible girl would stop writing letters to Colorado.

But I have never been accused of being overly sensible, have I, Henry?

So I shall continue to wait, continue to hope, continue to dream of silver mountains and golden promises, even as winter approaches and my small savings dwindle. I shall wait because the alternative—accepting that you have forgotten me entirely—is too devastating to contemplate.

Write to me, dearest. Even if it is to tell me goodbye. This silence is more cruel than honesty could ever be.

Until the mountains crumble or my heart learns wisdom,

Yours in faithful devotion,

Alice

P.S. I have enclosed a photograph taken at Coney Island last summer. Note how the wind has caught my skirt—I was laughing at something Molly Brennan had said about the bathing costumes. I was happy that day, genuinely happy, and I thought you might like to remember me so.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.