Letters as an emotional connection

Letters are an emotional connection between Ava Spirini and Gideon, turning a hesitant friendship into an exchange in which both can disclose what they find hard to say aloud. Their correspondence is not merely a record of growing intimacy: its handwritten pages, odd lists, stamps, jokes, and deliberate limits give each of them a concrete way to reach the other. Later, when the relationship has broken and Gideon does not answer Ava’s final letter, the form also reveals the painful difference between making contact and being answered.

First Letters and the Risk of Reaching Out

Gideon’s first letter arrives in a mint-green envelope that Ava’s father gives her after she has been expelled and is lying on her bed, disappointed by how much her life has changed. The timing matters: the letter interrupts a moment in which she feels she has let down her father, Kelly, and herself. Inside are two pages of neat handwriting. Gideon admits that he has never written anyone an actual letter and is unsure how long one ought to be or what important thing he has to say. What he settles on is that he is glad they met. The smallness of the declaration is part of its force: rather than performing confidence, he risks offering a sincere first connection.

Gideon makes the letter recognizably his by adding a list of things he finds weird. It ranges from bananas and snakes to people who pronounce an extra sound in “ask,” and finally to people who can write letters without lists. He jokingly calls Ava naturally cool, then asks her to write back if she wants to. The list’s comic digressions do not conceal that he is exposing himself; they make that exposure manageable. Ava reads the letter again, finds it funny and unexpectedly revealing, and decides that she should answer because she does not want him to think she rejects his friendship.

Ava’s reply answers his playfulness with her own. She teases him about calling her weird, argues the merits of fruit, and asks about his decision to live without a phone or internet. Written late because she cannot sleep, it wanders through her uncertainty about what else to say before ending with an invitation for him to write again. She hand-delivers it because she does not know where to buy a stamp; only afterward does she realize that a post office would have been the ordinary solution. The episode makes the correspondence physical and slightly awkward, but also shows her effort to cross the distance between them rather than wait for a perfect or polished gesture.

A Shared Practice of Honesty

Gideon’s response to receiving Ava’s letter is as revealing as the letter itself. He feels giddy relief that she wants him to write again, especially because he had feared his first attempt would make things awkward at work. He remembers drafting his letter four times and learning it by heart, while imagining that Ava wrote hers in a single pass. Her apparent ease contrasts with his tendency to obsess over what he sends. He treats the next letter as a small act of exploration: he wants to write and send it without thinking himself into silence.

That effort takes a practical form in Gideon’s next letter. He has set a kitchen timer for thirty minutes and promised himself not to reread what he writes. His friend Robbie has encouraged him to be bolder and stop being shy, and Gideon explains that he is trying to act on that advice. He also gives Ava the short version of his decision to give up phone and internet: they were not making him happy, and he wanted to see whether living without them might help. He describes himself as someone who tends to live with anxiety rather than as a naturally carefree person. In this exchange, a writing limit is not just a quirky rule; it helps him risk saying something personal before self-consciousness can edit it away.

Ava adopts the same thirty-minute, no-rereading limit, making the rule reciprocal rather than Gideon’s private exercise. Her letter moves beyond their jokes into a frank account of how her outlook has changed. She once expected to travel and see the world, and used to think of herself as positive, but after what has happened she finds the world harder to understand and the future exhausting. She does not claim to be ready to explain everything. Instead, she proposes that they tell each other more when they are ready: Gideon can tell her the story behind his phone and internet decision, and she can tell him about the year that has altered her life.

The exchange gives both characters permission to be incomplete. Ava says she has realized how miserable she is, but does not yet disclose the whole story; Gideon likewise offers only the short version of his decision. Their letters do not require either person to present a finished account or a cheerful self. Ava says that the letters make her happy, even if only for a moment, and thanks Gideon for making her laugh. In that way the correspondence offers connection without pretending that either person’s difficulties have been solved.

Letters Against Silence and Loss

The book places this developing exchange against the larger shape of Ava’s grief for Kelly. Ava remembers waking to the news of Kelly’s death after the call to her father’s house phone at 5:37 a.m.; seven minutes later, her father came to her room and told her. She counts the Sundays since Kelly died, and each one recalls the beginning of that loss. The letters with Gideon do not replace this bond or make grief disappear. Rather, they establish a different kind of ongoing connection at a time when Ava is struggling to imagine how life can continue.

A memory of Kelly also remains vivid through the small marks she left in Ava’s room. Kelly had always drawn or written on Ava’s mirror; on one afternoon she erased a drawing and carefully replaced it with a heart. Ava later wonders whether Kelly meant the gesture as a sign of love and remembrance. The scene makes clear that a relationship can continue to be present through remembered words and images, even when the person is gone. Against that history, Ava and Gideon’s letters are not a cure for loss; they are a living practice of telling another person what matters while the possibility of reply remains.

After Ava and Gideon break up, the correspondence changes from a shared exchange into a final attempt to communicate. Ava continues therapy with Nola and, despite Gideon having said he does not want to talk to her, writes one last letter to thank him. She tells him that she misses him at work and includes Ricky’s kind assessment of him. She apologizes for hurting him, describes how he helped her feel beautiful and laugh, and credits him with helping her see that not everything in her life was a waste. She also thanks him for his poems and for helping her pick up the shards of her broken heart so she could begin putting it back together herself.

Gideon does not reply. Ava understands that she cannot blame him, but his silence still hurts; she supposes he has moved away and is living the life he had planned. The unanswered letter marks a limit of the form: care can be expressed, and gratitude can be made tangible, without obliging the recipient to reopen a relationship. Later, a pale blue envelope containing a small card brings Ava happy tears, but the text’s emotional emphasis is not that letters guarantee reconciliation. It is that they can carry feeling across uncertainty, distance, and change, while leaving the other person free to answer—or not.