Dear Stranger,
It has been raining since I arrived.
Not dramatically. No thunder splitting the sky. No lightning waiting for someone to raise a body toward it. Just a steady gray rain softening the lake and making the mountains disappear.
It feels appropriate.
In 1816, Mary Shelley came here during the year that became known as the Year Without a Summer. The weather kept everyone inside. Lord Byron suggested they write ghost stories. Mary was eighteen years old when the beginnings of Frankenstein found her.
We like to tell that story as if the weather made the monster.
Rain against the windows. A house full of writers. A nightmare. A body assembled and brought to life.
But standing here, I keep thinking about what came afterward.
The creature did not become monstrous because he was made from dead things. He became monstrous because the person who made him looked at him once and left.
Perhaps creation is not the dangerous part.
Perhaps abandonment is.
I walked along the lake this morning and watched people appear and disappear inside the fog. For a while, I followed a man in a dark coat because something about the way he carried himself reminded me of a character I have not written yet.
That happens more often than I admit.
A stranger passes me in a railway station or sits alone in a restaurant, and suddenly I know what he regrets. I know what he has hidden from his wife. I know what he keeps in the locked drawer of his desk.
None of it is true, of course.
Not about him.
But it may become true about someone else.
I came to Geneva looking for Mary Shelley.
Instead, I may have found a man walking away from something he made.
Yours from elsewhere,
Lore