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