Dear Jessie,

We don't know one another. My name is Matthew, and I’m your great-grandson. 

I’ve been thinking about you a lot, and I made some art—a painting and some noise. 

This winter, in an attempt to make sense of our shared history, I went to Edinburgh to see where you lived. 

Your house in Leith isn’t there anymore. What remains is a middle-class apartment building with a gentrified strip. 

I felt nothing.

I visited your husband's lands in Shetland. 

I felt even less there. 

It was a long and expensive trip to feel...well, not very much. 

I did, however, find some feeling in the Celtic music, so I made you these sounds.

Underneath the bass and the reverb there are bagpipes and a group of Shetlandic fiddlers rehearsing. 

You can’t really hear them now. 

21st-century art noise washing away the decipherable. 

Hauntingly, the one sound that has remained clear is a woman singing what sounds like a lullaby. 

I’m imagining you singing that to my grandfather and wondering how our lives would have turned out if you had survived his birth. 

A tenderness handed down generations.

This work is an attempt at remembering.

A wave crashing silently in a pitch-black ocean.