Dear Sylvie: A Handful of Letters to Nearly Perfect Strangers

Abstract

Summary In this collection of letters addressed to nearly perfect strangers, I consider the ways fleeting connections can move with and shape us despite never becoming deep relationships. Drawing on the anthropology of care and kinship, I revisit the summer my father and I spent living in an apartment building for cancer patients and their caregivers. My journal entries from that summer are filled with stories about people I hardly knew and, in some cases, whose names I never learned. The letters in this essay are written to and about these strangers, who landed in my journal right alongside the people in the world I hold most dear. They are the words I wish I would have said to them then and what I would like to say to them now. Read together, these letters suggest that chance encounters need not transform into ongoing relationships to play a part in making us who we are.