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.