The Best Love Letter in the World by Bridget Goldschmidt

When I was a child, I had a passion for economy. I’m sure that I’d never heard the expression

“Brevity is the soul of wit” at that time, nor was I endowed with much wit, or even a conscious

sense of humor, at that tender age, but I was obsessed with taking the least amount of time to

do anything. This included brushing my teeth (a maximum of 30 seconds allotted for each

quadrant, counted out in my head, the numbers spaced by “Mississippi”); putting on my shoes

(already tied, requiring me to squeeze my feet into them as if they were too-tight slip-ons); or

eating breakfast (bolus of toast daubed with Cheez Whiz and a glassful of pulp-free orange

juice downed in one huge, potentially airway-obstructing swallow). So it was the same with

writing a love letter.

It wasn’t that I had anyone to write a love letter to, or even about, only that I wished to provide

the perfect example, one that others might draw upon in years to come, a sort of

magnanimous gesture to the world at large. In fact, it would be able to stand on its own as the

ideal form of such a missive, encompassing all of the desire, heartbreak, pathos and

resignation that I knew had to exist within its lines. After all, I reasoned, a love letter must mean

that the lovers weren’t together, that they were separated by cruel fate, unalterable

circumstance —otherwise why would they be apart? — so any communication sent from one

to the other must encapsulate that hard fact.

With this in mind, I set to work, honing the contents of my proposed letter in, of course, the

most concise manner possible. Despite my youth, I was actually no novice at this task: At the

age of 4, before I could write, I had begun dictating characteristically terse vignettes to my

mother for potential inclusion in “Highlights” and other publications for children. I came up with

dozens of stories, which we would take down to the mailbox on the corner and send off, with a

kiss on the envelope for luck.

None of them were ever published by the magazines in question, but this failed to daunt me,

convinced as I was of my own talent and driven by my burning need to share my conception of

what two very naughty bunny rabbits might get up to when the little girl who owned them was

away for the day. My mother was a patient amanuensis, no doubt correcting my grammar and

adding punctuation to impose order on my artless tales. Perhaps, if rejection letters arrived,

she quietly disposed of them to spare me the disappointment of knowing that “Fluffy and

Cottontail” wouldn’t be appearing in print any time soon. Never having been told directly to

quit, I persevered at stories.

At one point, in show and tell at school, I revealed my intention to become a sort of

professional modern-day scribe for people when I grew up, writing bite-size stories for all

occasions on demand. The class stared back at me in utter incomprehension. I looked toward

the teacher, who shook her head, said, “That’s not actually a job,” and told me to take my seat.

Then she wrote a note for me to take home to my mother, who laughed when she read it. “She

thinks you have too much of an imagination,” my mother replied when I asked what the note

said. I shrugged, puzzled. Since when was that a bad thing? I made up my mind to keep

writing, although I kept my future career plans to myself.

As I labored over my love letter, which I was old enough to write myself, albeit in clumsy block

letters, it struck me that the best solution would be just one sentence long, one line that would

convey all of the necessary emotions so well that there wouldn’t be a need for any more words.

What could be more tragic, I thought, than to be sent away to war, liable to be killed at any

moment, far from the object of one’s eternal adoration, or to be the one waiting at home for any

news, knowing that any precious communication sent from the front could be the last? Even

then, however, I had some inherent sense of the writer’s old command, “show, don’t tell,” since

I was sure that it wouldn’t do at all to actually write that. No, my perfect letter would only

suggest that awful possibility without naming it; that would make it all the more poignant, the

sense of things unsaid, of a love whose promise would perhaps go unfulfilled.

After many hours of thought and labor on the subject — not a particularly economical use of

my time, no doubt, but I had set myself a task and I needed to fulfill it — the following line

came to me, harvested from the field of my limited experience:

“I love you very much, but I am in the army.”

I imagined it written in an elaborate calligraphic script few could master in a lifetime, on a tiny

scroll of parchment hand-delivered to a maiden playing a harp in a castle turret, or scrawled on

drab armed forces-issue stationery and sent in an air mail envelope dirty from much handling

to the mailbox of a girl washing lunch dishes in a plain suburban ranch house in Anywhere,

USA. If texting had existed back then, I would also have envisioned it as a plaintive example of

such, festooned with heart emojis and inviting an immediate response.

As far as I was concerned, it could have been emblazoned on a billboard by the side of a

highway or puffed out by a skywriting airplane as an essential distillation of the human

condition, that love’s pain and potential are forever intertwined.

After all of this time, I still believe that. And to all of those yearning for the ultimate declaration

of love, one able to express the most in the fewest words: You’re welcome.

Bridget Goldschmidt received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in fiction, from Brooklyn College in 1991. Her short fiction has been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Friday Flash Fiction, Literally Stories, Oblivioni and The RavensPerch, and one of her stories was shortlisted for the Edinburgh True Flash Awards. She works as a trade magazine editor and lives by the ocean in New York.