All This on a Postcard - Short Fiction by Eve
An early short story of mine, published in Toronto a long time ago...
Where do you get your ideas from?
It’s a common question put to writers, especially from those who don’t write, and who don’t fully comprehend how someone can whip up a novel or short story out of thin air.
There isn’t a standard answer to this, of course, it’s different from writer to writer, from project to project. Some people are blessed with vivid imaginations and do have ideas just pop into their heads out of nowhere. Often, though, writing is a kind of confessional, a therapeutic, cathartic expression of something held very deep. That’s the case with this story (and incidentally, it’s connected to a couple of the poems in Lost in You, which shows you how much this experience affected me).
I’ll try to be brief - many years ago, I had a male friend I adored. We were both writers (he was a poet) and although we weren’t best friends, we connected on the level of writing and, to a degree, the fact that we both had some issues with depression and feeling different than others around us. After high school, we briefly reconnected again as adults, through a mutual friend. My friend was engaged, and he invited me to the wedding. We went to a couple of poetry readings together, when one of his poems was published by a journal that I had sent his poems to. My poem wasn’t chosen, so it was an awkward night, watching my friend up on stage and talking to the editor who had to face me, the rejectee, and try to be diplomatic.
For a couple of months, we actually wrote letters to each other - real letters, not emails. They were probably pretentious and overly dramatic, but I looked forward to every one. One letter of his, written after a long silence from me, consisted of one line, typed in the middle of the page, like a poem. I hope you’re well; I miss your sense of humour.
Around that time I went across Canada in a Greyhound bus to see my cousin in Victoria, B.C. At each stop I would write funny postcards and send them to my friend. Then he wrote a poem, the first line of which read “You sent me postcards from the Prairies…” and well, I was over the moon, and convinced something was going on here.
Something magical, something worthy of a romance novel. Was he trying to tell me something? Was he falling for me? It became clear through our letters back and forth that he regretted his marriage, that they had only married because they shared a child, and that she didn’t understand his poetry or even him, in any significant way. He was never inappropriate with me, but I could feel his unhappiness. Combined with the subtle things he would say to me, the fact that he wrote a poem about me…well, you can imagine that my vivid imagination went off like a firecracker.
And fizzled. He wasn't trying to tell me anything. I was just a friend to him.
This story was born out of this experience. The only part of this story that actually happened was: I did take a bus trip across Canada (Canadian dollar coins are called ‘loonies’, in case you didn’t get that reference, from the etching of a loon on one side), I did send him a few postcards, and I did go to his wedding. He did not marry someone willowy and aloof, he did not move to Vancouver, and he most definitely did not take my virginity on his basement floor. I never thought I was pregnant by him. I was not on that bus chasing after him, holding onto the one last thing that could possibly keep me in his life.
But I think - I hope - you can get a sense of how I felt about all of this from what came out in this story. I took the somewhat prosaic reality of being friend-zoned and turned it into this story.
Writing can be a powerful window into a person’s soul. Think about this the next time you read something that strikes you as profoundly personal, or coming from a place of experience and bittersweet wisdom. Sometimes an idea just pops into a writer’s head and we go with it (Spye vs Spye never happened to me in any way, shape or form), but sometimes there’s a glimpse there, a sliver of truth, a peek behind the curtain. Without this way of expressing it, I don’t know where I’d be.
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OnAirLoveAffair on 2026-02-15 16:26:45 (UTC)
@ Eve: Despite this story being fiction, your emotional openness with your listeners is why I am one. You choose the courage to share personal inspirations like this one, and in such eloquent – sometimes heartbreaking – ways.
Your writing style in tragically romantic stories like this one has a way of bridging the gap between my own unanswered-love experiences and what the women who were on the other end of them may have been feeling too. As you've illustrated, that experience is universal.
I’ll never truly understand what your character was feeling in the last minute of this story. But I certainly do understand my versions of it. The way you express your versions of it, is one reason I listen.
IRL, do you think he ever knew?
(P.S. – I left you a separate note about this story over on Patreon.)
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A Eve on 2026-03-06 19:57:26 (UTC)
I gathered up my courage and sent him this story. I guess I was treating our friendship like a chess game in which neither of us spoke. I don’t know what I expected to happen, if anything, but as you can imagine, nothing happened. He said nothing about it. We never talked about it, not even when this story got published in a Toronto magazine.
We kept in touch sporadically after that, until one day he popped into an art gallery where I worked. My young co-worker was with me, a gorgeous girl who modelled part time and turned heads wherever she went. As I happily and stupidly smiled at him and enjoyed the fact that he had come in to see me, he fixed his eyes on her and said “You are incredibly beautiful.” To her credit she waved it off and then left us alone…but what was the point? She needn’t have bothered. In one of his last letters to me, he said that he ‘had seen the flash of pain in your eyes when I said that, and I’m sorry’.
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A Eve on 2026-03-06 19:58:42 (UTC)
One last little nugget: when Facebook first started up, it was pretty common for people to keep their profiles public and for everyone, I mean everyone, to look up old school friends, etc. There was no cyberstalking then, there was no need for ultra privacy, and it wasn’t creepy to look up every single person you’d ever known to see if they were on ‘the Facebook’. I was looking around one day, after someone from middle school had found me and messaged me, and thought I’d look him up. I found him, his smiling face beaming out at the world and his relationship status reading ‘divorced’. At this point, I was with someone myself, and I didn’t expect anything romantic to happen, I was just curious to connect with him again as friends. So after a couple of days I messaged him with a very airy, very non-romantic hello.
When he messaged me back, I noticed that his profile picture had changed. It was now a photo of him and his girlfriend and his status read ‘in a relationship’.
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A Eve on 2026-03-06 19:59:34 (UTC)
As it happens, I had learned throughout this that my friend suffered from schizophrenia and manic depression (which I think is now called bi-polar disorder), which resulted in him swinging from one extreme to the other, and ultimately unable to maintain a stable relationship. He and I would have been a complete disaster together. He was not the one for me, nor was I the one for him, and this would have been one easily forgettable little crush but for one thing: because of him, I became convinced that it didn’t matter if I was a wonderful person (my poem The Best Person You Know is about this) if I was smart and funny and talented and sweet and loving and kind - it only mattered how hot I was. And since I would never be ‘hot’, especially in a decade before body positivity, when standards were harsh and the men I knew generally did not deign to talk to anyone who wasn’t ridiculously attractive, I was doomed.
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A Eve on 2026-03-06 20:00:00 (UTC)
That blow to my self-image, that incredibly painful belief, changed me as a person. If I couldn’t interest someone with whom I had so much in common - someone who told me I was the best person he’d ever known, someone who felt safe with me and shared his dreams and fears and hopes, someone who missed me, and my sense of humour, and who wrote poetry about me - because I wasn’t hot enough, well… I sincerely believed no man ever would. I was not a hottie. I would never be. And if that’s all men cared about, I felt cursed, and fated to be alone, forever.
I carried this belief with me into some dodgy situations, and it led me into situations I would come to sincerely regret. It coloured my view of life, and my own sense of self-worth. It made me feel ‘unfuckable’, to be vulgar. Even the man who date-raped me the first time I ever tried to have sex told me that he didn’t find me that attractive, and that he liked my friend better.
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A Eve on 2026-03-06 20:00:23 (UTC)
I think all of this is where Eve came from, and where my romance writing came from. It’s all a kind of therapy, letting me experience what it’s like to be desired, to be thought of as attractive, to be considered sexy and definitely fuckable. Writing saved me from utter despair by giving me that outlet, and Eve let me unleash all the passionate sensuality and genuine love of men that had been so ignored and rejected for so long.
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Car54whereartthou on 2026-02-11 08:10:13 (UTC)
This is such a touching story, and I loved it...and it really is a testament to how important your art is to you, to getting it right, to bring the authenticity that each story needs!
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A Eve on 2026-03-06 20:01:11 (UTC) (edited)
Thank you so much! It is really important to me - you never know when someone from Medicine Hat will stumble upon your work and say hey, wait...where's the Teepee?
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MadWithLust on 2026-03-21 14:16:26 (UTC)
I'm still stunned by how much you could pack into this short story. It's crazy how simultaneoulsy very little happens (in the narrator's present) but so much happened in the past to lead to this moment. What a unbelieveable mix of emotions...I don't even know how to feel about it. Well, except the ending...that was just such a heartbreaking image, in the middle of the night, all alone in the whole wide world with such thoughts...
But I have thought about that link between a work of fiction and reality. I had wondered how actors/actresses could pull off such amazing performances in the craziest, most fantastical stories (ancient history, sci-fi, or war movies), many times where the they never experienced anything even remotely close to the actual events in the story. But I came to the conclusion that the actor must have connected to something real in their life that they could tap into and express to make it come alive on-screen...you deserve the warmest, sweetest hug after this!!