Unsent letter #7

Dear You,

First, a pre­amble. If you prefer, you may ignore this part and skip straight to the meat of the mat­ter, since I know all too well how you quickly tire of my char­ac­ter­istic verbosity.

I am becom­ing a creature of habit, I see that now. I should stop writ­ing to you, I see that now. Because my muddled com­mu­nic­a­tions always begin in the same way, I see that now. How­ever, I am sick in soul, mind and body, and thus enjoy curl­ing up in a corner and gnaw­ing on my own flesh until naus­eous. Why change the pat­terns of an unhur­ried life­time, say I? So this unsent let­ter will weave its spell in much the same fash­ion as always. Please bear with me, then, as I let another abject apo­logy slip through my fin­gers and out onto the page.

I am sorry for remain­ing unwrit­ten for so long, just as I am sorry that you do not appear to have drawn so much as a single breath in an equally lengthy period of sun­rises and sun­sets. Some­times, in idle moments that last for days on end, I sit here won­der­ing if the rhythmic rising and fall­ing of your chest has ceased entirely. Fear not, because I soon slap myself silly, slid­ing into sens­ib­il­ity, and dis­miss that thought in an instant. No, it’s simply not possible.

I cling to the belief that, some­where, you are sigh­ing wear­ily at this latest missive. Or unstead­ily draw­ing in rushes of air after an out­pour­ing of tears. Or chok­ing on fits of giggles as you shake your head, point and laugh at these neatly spaced lines, and won­der why I still bother. Or gasp­ing as your body is shaken by phys­ical sen­sa­tions that neither of us would ever dis­cuss for fear of our faces turn­ing shades of not so secret­ive scarlet.

Maybe, how­ever, there exists another explan­a­tion. Is your res­pir­at­ory sys­tem now mech­an­ic­ally reg­u­lated, inhaled and exhaled and inhaled and exhaled again thanks to the quietly unas­sum­ing pis­ton of med­ical inter­ven­tion? I hope so. This, indeed, is my cur­rent assump­tion con­cern­ing your con­tin­ued silence.

I don’t have much soul left for you, thanks to the way in which you have sucked it dry dur­ing our one-way cor­res­pond­ence, but I am hard­wir­ing this piti­ful remainder to the pristine tech­no­logy and trust­ing in the powers of pos­it­ive think­ing. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. In. Out. Out. Out. Out. And breathe. And breathe?

I have a request. I am enclos­ing a simple brown paper bag, donated by a local gro­cer. I would be grate­ful if you could frame your response on its crinkled sur­face in your fam­ously impen­et­rable scribble. No need for explan­a­tions con­cern­ing your ongo­ing absence. Just inform me how the weather is; tell me if the tree that always tapped its branches at your French win­dow is now just so much burnt autum­nal death or spring­ing forth with sum­mer life; whis­per in my ear about whether you sleep all day, all night or both; worry me with care­fully con­struc­ted untruths about never shoot­ing bolt upright from night­mares; enter­tain me with brief descrip­tions of the taste­less meals you are fed through tubes. All I require are the simplest details of your day-to-day exist­ence. Humour me.

When your words are writ­ten — or dic­tated, mur­mured, maybe even guessed at by those who watch over you and hold your pale hands in their patient clutches — please fill the paper bag with three slow move­ments of your lungs, and send it to me post-haste, before the evid­ence dis­ap­pears into even more thin air than you can cur­rently man­age in your weakened state. In return, I prom­ise to refrain from pier­cing its outer skin and try­ing to ascer­tain whether or not you still exist.

Yours forever,
An Unre­li­able Witness