This epistolary essay, which is part of the "Sick Women" collaborative research project on feminist methods of correspondence and care, comprises a six-month section of correspondence that desires the minor, marginalised objects of Edvard Munch’s and Munch’s female relatives’ health archives, seeking close encounters with them. Our letters begin with a pocket-sized blue sputum bottle used by patients with pulmonary tuberculosis to collect and conceal contagious phlegm. From there, we correspond on two closely observed studies by Munch of his sick sister and aunt, as well as epistolary objects they exchanged in kinship and care. In this way, our letters entwine with their letters, subject and object blurring as experiences across time are written, folded, enveloped, opened, read: a process which chronically repeats. Written to accompany the exhibition Lifeblood – Edvard Munch, our exchange considers the painters’ ailments, relations, attachments, and kinships through the transversal pieces of letter, postcard, a secret gift through the post. It is a health archive in letters that we have absorbed in our replies. Our correspondence also travels across time and space; spoken to and between bodies alive and dead. We risk seeking to imagine what we don’t know, but perhaps could know, or know differently, through the act of letter writing: the risky and speculative desire in the reply.