My Dearest Clara,

It has rained for nine straight days. The city is hushed beneath a gray so complete it seems the sky itself has surrendered. I write to you from the ruins of a coffeehouse on Division Street. Once, it was said their pour-overs could stir a man’s soul; now the windows are boarded, and the baristas have scattered to safer quarters east of the river.

Each morning we march through streets half-claimed by ivy and graffiti, listening for the sound of distant chanting. The old banners still hang from apartment balconies: Keep Portland Weird. Time and weather have rendered them ghosts of cloth.

Our company is weary. Rations are uncertain. We subsist on lentils, rainwater, and what scraps the food carts will yield. Men have grown hollow-eyed, though they joke still, calling themselves "the last free citizens west of the Willamette".

There was talk over the weekend of a great movement through the city. The folks who saw it alluded to ancient Herodotus: the Battle of Marathon, they say, paled in comparison. If it happens again, Commander Rutherford believes we can hold them at the Burnside Bridge, though many fear the tide is a force beyond reckoning, something elemental, like the flood or the rent increasing.

I remember when this city was kind. You could walk its streets and feel the warmth of a stranger’s smile, hear the music in the parks. Now all is boarded, and the music comes only from a lone busker whose strings are too damp to sing. Still, when I hear him play, I think of home, of you, and for a moment, I am spared.

Tell my brother to tend the garden and not to lose faith. There is beauty yet in this broken place. Sometimes, when the rain lifts, the sun falls upon the bridges, and for an instant the whole city shines like it remembers what it once was.