Dear Society,

I certainly hope that whomsoever has deigned to read this, my latest epistolary opus, perceives the irony inherent in the above salutation, because I know that it is more than likely that exactly no one, let alone the whole of society, will peruse this text, drafted by moi, Matilda Darling, burgeoning auteur and scientist; I write in the dark, for the dark, like the draftsmen of the caves of Lascaux, my work unacknowledged, my voice unheard. Still, the very act of unburdening myself, of removing my thoughts and worries and fears and complaints and arguments with the world from the claustrophobic room of my own mind to the wide-open prairie of the page, the weight on my shoulders coursing down through my fingertips to drain from the weary spigot of my ballpoint pen, is a luxury par excellence.

But, on the off chance that someone has been keeping up with these letters to no one—I have begun, in fact, to think of my body of work as a sort of Waiting for Godot for the teenage set—I bring you, loyal reader, the final installment of my misadventures in beautification, the outset of which I had described in my last letter. My uncle and his girlfriend Shoshanna had spent the week at our house, and on their last night here, Shoshanna deemed it necessary that she give me a makeover. How she talked me into participating in such a vile activity, and why I acquiesced to her coercion, escape me as the event recedes in time; I wonder now not why I did it before but rather how I feel about the after. I pride myself on my swiftness of mind, my ability to quickly and rationally come down on the correct side of a debate, yet I still cannot, weeks later, make up my mind as to whether or not I liked the way Shoshanna made me look.

Dear Superstorm Sandy,

Sandy, you pernicious jezebel, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I find myself in dire need of redress for a further list of grievances that have amassed against your meteorological person in the ensuing days since you received my last missive. The basis of my continued complaint primarily concerns not so much you directly, wretched Sandy (it seems that certain thousands of people living on Long Island and in the Rockaways and the more seedy of the barrier islands of New Jersey surely will have many more complaints) but rather an indirect side effect of your ungainly barging up the eastern seaboard, which is to say, the protracted malodorous presence in my abode of my Uncle Harry and his witch of a girlfriend Shoshanna. They had arrived on Sunday and originally planned to stay for one or two nights at most, but ended up being forced by Sandy-wrought havoc (the ensuing gridlock, the gas rationing, the lack of power and heat and water in Uncle Harry’s apartment building) to remain our houseguests long past the expiration date prescribed in the Benjamin Franklin maxim (i.e. “houseguests are like fish; they begin to smell after three days”), or in other words, until the following Saturday morning.

You may now recall my previous letter—here I pause to wonder if perhaps, after dissolution, hurricanes and tropical depressions and superstorms then take on some kind of corporeal form, like the famous dryads and naiads of ancient Greece: if you, Sandy, are now a transparent sort of Pre-Raphaelite nude, decked in sheer panels of cumulus, your tendrils damped in humidity, flying behind you as you skip ‘cross the furthest steppes of Greenland hand in hand with your fellow storms-spirits made animate—but I digress. As I was saying: you may recall the narrative recounted in my previous letter in which the dark tide of your storm surge washed up all manner of embarrassment and self-loathing upon the shore of my life. And though you passed on to northwest passages, Shoshanna and Harry remained in situ at our humble abode here on Euclid Street, and the pulse of the dark tide thus continued.

Dear Superstorm Sandy,

I am well aware, self-centered pre-adolescent though I may be, that of all the millions of persons on the Eastern Seaboard affected by Hurricane Sandy, I am the least of these. Your swirling superstorm essence flung its obese corpus upon our fair coast like some kind of meteorological opera diva throwing herself down on the rickety wicker chaise longue in her dressing room after a particularly disappointing performance, the chaise longue then of course collapsing, at point of impact, into nothing more than a pile of matchsticks. The destruction thou hast wrought is vast, the people you have displaced countless, the images crowding the jammy pages of my father’s New York Times more than a little disturbing. These splintery heaps of timber, as densely packed as the sticks in a beaver dam or a game of Ker-Plunk, which only last week had been intact ribbons of boardwalk, two-story vinyl-sided vacation homes, amusement parks, bandstands; these charred ruins of Brooklyn by the sea; these unelectrified skyscrapers standing sentinel in the dark, as quiet and empty-eyed as the statues of Easter Island. I have been dreaming of black rivers of sea-muck coursing down Euclid Street here in Albany, my brother and I opening the front door to leave for school and finding the whole Hudson River rushing by our doorstep.

All that being said: while the victims of such widespread and devastating physical destruction should be at the forefront of our national consciousness, I do think it bears noting that apocalyptic events such as these tend to have much more far-reaching consequences than are ever noted by FEMA bureaucrats or the liberal news media; I speak, that is, of consequences of the heart, of the invisible damages done to the inside of a person, rather than to the outside of his home.

Dear Curiously Aligned Universe,

Indeed, this eighth grade year does continue to persist in unfolding most strangely. God knows I have tried to fully insulate myself from the insidious tentacles of social life, have time and time again turned away from that preteen pyre of nonsense, heaped high with dances and crushes and cliques and cell phones, around which my fellow students gather, drawing ever nearer, puerile brains benumbed even further by its bewitching glow, until, in what amounts to a kind of Kristallnacht of the mind, academics are wholly abandoned. Yet it appears that no matter how strenuously one tries to live a socially abstemious life in pursuit of loftier intellectual goals, no matter how thoroughly one attempts to shut out the world, the world will nevertheless rudely elbow its back way into one’s hermitage. I suppose, after all, that even the solitude of St. Francis was occasionally interrupted by birds.

I suppose all this has something to do with the fact that this year I have elected to spend my lunch periods in the cafeteria, rather than sequestered in the handicapped stall of the girls’ restroom in the languages corridor. I recognize that my stated desire to recuse myself from the majority of the more superficial pursuits of the average middle school student does not quite line up with this newfound interest in situating myself daily in the lunchroom, which is the pulsating social nexus, the Grand Central Station, if you will, of any American educational institution. Choosing to abstain from the many pagan festivals of adolescence is in no way an act of sacrifice on my part; I have no desire to go to dances, for no doubt that merely crossing the gymnasium threshold into that swirling aural muck of hormones and hair product and throbbing pop music would cause me to instantly break out in hives; I have no desire to go the sleepovers to which I am not invited in the first place, for I can think of many a better way to pass a Friday night than gorging myself on Cheetos and taking in multiple sequential viewings of Katy Perry: Part Of Me. But I must now admit that though I may have pretended otherwise, avoiding the cafeteria was never something I wished to do. Though I do not particularly like or respect the vast majority of Van Buren Middle School students, I do have a few friends, and however misanthropic I may be, it is only human nature to want to marry victuals to conversation, to desire company in repast. I sat in the bathroom not because I disdained the cafeteria but because I was afraid of the cafeteria, afraid rather of its inhabitants, of the taunts and jabs potentially hurled by my thoughtlessly cruel peers.

Dear Slightly Less Cruel Universe,

Recent events in my circumscribed, pre-but-almost-adolescent life have given me cause to reflect on the strange beast that is American mass transit. Although my experience with mass transit has been limited to daily rides to and from school on the local city bus route, and one brief journey on an extremely screechy subway train in New York City whilst visiting my Uncle Harry, it seems to me that these buses and subways, these light rail lines and ferries, are this country’s great comminglers. On such vehicles as are enlisted by municipal governments to provide travel services to the local proletariat, their riders are tossed together in a kind of great human salad, whether rich or poor, young or old, black or white, popular or unpopular. (Although it does seem to me that the majority of citizens who utilize the services of the Capital District Transportation Authority are primarily old, and black.) Whilst riding the bus, one finds oneself bumping up against, both literally and figuratively, all manner of people.

Dear Cruel Universe,

Sometimes we literary dissidents, we harbingers of truth, are required to mete out a temporary sort of armistice with the world, the intellectual and moral decay of which we are so bitterly and continually locked with in struggle, and instead throw ourselves on our metaphorical swords, which is to say, our pens. Sometimes one’s personal life becomes so crowded with untimely misfortunes, so clouded with pain and confusion, that to focus on one’s vocational labors or the quotidian trivialities of existence seems all but impossible. One half-heartedly lifts her brows above the trench line, surveys the desolate no-man’s-land of this life, and, utterly lacking in the emotional wherewithal to charge the enemy, decides instead to hunker back down among the mud and helmets and discarded ammunition shells, and navel-gaze (much the in the manner of the self-pitying footman Thomas in the second season of Downton Abbey).

Dear United States Women’s Artistic Gymnastics National Team,

As much as it pains me to consider the cutesy infantile tragedy that is your team nickname, I have resolved to take up this cross and carry it, like so many Olympic torches, with the hope of igniting a flame, or even a spark, of social enlightenment among your ilk. Recent rather heavy-handed American television coverage of the women’s artistic gymnastics competition at the Games of the Thirtieth Olympiad have brought a panoply of issues with the current culture of your sport to my attention, and, as you may know, once my intellect has become aggrieved and my taste offended by some mind-blanching idiocy excreted by our turning world, I will not, nay cannot rest until I address such slights.

Dear Ms. James,

I first got wind of your novel while, fittingly, in a commode. You see, my best friend Laurence DuPlessus was home sick from school and, wanting to avoid the social peril that is sitting by oneself in the Van Buren Middle School cafeteria (the jeers, the straw-wrappers, the crumpled paper bags which rain down on one’s head), I decided the best course of action would be to sequester myself in a bathroom stall and partake of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich therein. Whilst so concealed and enjoying an extremely satisfying ice-cold chocolate milk, I overheard who else but my nemesis Madison Lauren and her minions skip-giggling into the lavatory. I immediately balanced my milk carton on the wheelchair-assistance bar and scrambled to prop my feet up on the toilet seat (because the only thing more perilous than being caught eating alone in the cafeteria is being caught eating alone in the bathroom) and valiantly attempted to wholly tune out their clattering halfwit banter and focus instead on Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but to no avail.

Dear Ms. Evans,

It has recently come to my attention that you exist. I first learned of one Miss Jenelle Evans via an article concerning your person in the pages of a certain unnamed gossip magazine which I recently made the mistake of perusing. Though I have attempted to bleach my mind of every offending particle of memory related to the dark hour in which I digested the base contents of the magazine in question, your visage has for some appalling reason remained with me, and has, one could almost say, haunted me.