Unsent letter #5

Dear You,

This letter may initially appear rather more muddled and weary than you have come to expect of my usually fastidiously ordered thoughts. I have only one somewhat pitiful justification for this. My tongue hurts.

Yes, I know that I do not write with my tongue (except for those occasional rude messages I might lick into the condensation magically formed on windows on cold winter mornings), but it is aching because I have spent the entire day collecting together a vast collection of stamps for you, then - as you will have seen when you retrieved this unexpected missive from the confines of your mailbox - coating the back of each one with a precious drop or two of my saliva and applying them to every available space on what was formerly an uninspiring brown envelope. Such a Herculean yet utterly ridiculous effort has left me quite exhausted.

For years, distant foreign relatives whom I often doubted had anything to do with my own ageing flesh and boiling blood have been sending me stamps. Stamps upon stamps upon stamps from the particular corner of the world that each chose to escape to in order to avoid the unpleasant business of family life. In truth, I have never seen so many ugly formal portraits of obscure world leaders. Nevertheless, I diligently kept each shiny-backed miniature in a leather pouch, in the hope that one day they would come in useful. Now, finally, my unwilling philately has found a purpose.

Regrettably, this letter may take some time to get to you. Of necessity, it has to go via Adelaide, Bangalore, Edmonton, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, Lima, Lincoln, Munich, New York, Shanghai, Sydney and a small village in Somerset before it can embark upon its last stretch to the frayed edges of the map, almost the ends of the Earth, in order to drop into your cupped hands. By that stage, I have no doubt that the envelope you receive will be dotted with the faint trails of fingerprints left by the previous recipients. Should you feel a momentary sense of irritation, even disappointment, that the pure clean lines of the paper may have been sullied, please do remember that despite the bewilderment that each surely felt at discovering such a letter in their morning post, they obeyed the instructions written in my tiniest uppercase and did not open it.

Why such a pointless exercise? Because I like thinking of my precise lines of ink travelling the world, even when I am stuck here shielding my blurring vision against black words on a stark white screen. Next time, I shall scratch each and every poorly chosen word in pencil.

Yours forever,
An Unreliable Witness