You have mail

Sometimes it doesn’t feel as if I can send enough of whoever I happen to be today in a simple envelope. I send you scribbled words on notepaper, I send gifts, CDs I have painstakingly sequenced for you. Yet these are only elements of this person before you. The merest droplets of character. I want to send me.

I hear a deadpan Welsh voice reciting a macabre tale, over stormy guitars, about a woman receiving a package in the mail. I smile at the full horror of the idea. Don’t worry, I’ve dismissed it.

Maybe I will just send a few clippings of my hair. I have enough to spare these days, after all. Or I could dip my fingers in ink and leave the imprints on a sheet of notepaper. Or I could simply breathe on the narrow feint and the torn edges.

I close my eyes, inhale, exhale, feel the paper fluttering. Sign. Stamp. Lick. Shut. I hope you get this letter. The post can be so unreliable. The last handwritten missive I opened from you wasn’t even addressed to me, even though you used terms of endearment like I was the oldest of old friends.

This is too difficult. I can’t write at the speed at which my brain seeks to pour out thoughts. It won’t be long before this pristine sheet of notepaper finds itself scrunched, crunched and crumpled, then perched precariously atop the white mountain in the corner of the room, surrounded by a ring of protective wire mesh.

I shall try again tomorrow. Finding exactly the right words can be a problem.