Skip to main content

Letterbox

By
Every Friday afternoon I sit down at my kitchen table and write you a letter. In the beginning they were all filled with how much I missed you, or how miserable I was, or how unfair everything was. In the beginning I would reread all my letters. Let my angry, sad, hurt words wash over me again. Now I just reread them after I'm done. Check for mistakes. Over time they've changed to me writing to you about my life. I tell you the little things that happened during the week, about fragments of other people's conversations I've overheard. They used to be stacked on one of the top shelves in the kitchen, always threatening to fall down onto the floor. Now I keep them in a box under the bed. It says “letters” on the lid. I pray to god no one ever opens that and reads them. It's Monday now and my boss is telling me I'm moving offices. They need me over at the main office for an uncertain amount of time and could I please pack up and leave on Wednesday? They'll pay for a flat in a company owned building, no need for me to rent out my one bedroom apartment. No need for me to stay too long today, just get my stuff and email things and call this one guy who'll set me up with train tickets. I'm in my kitchen. Calling mum to tell her I'm moving. For a bit. Yes, it's quite sudden. Yes, it's a good career move. No, really I don't mind, nothing to keep me, and so on. I need her to water the plant and maybe hoover once in awhile. And, I need to borrow the big suitcase. I'm sorting through what to bring with me. Picking outfits and carefully packing my makeup. I have a big black garbage bag for things that I ought to have thrown away ages ago. It's slowly filling with useless things. My foot bumps into the box of letters under the bed. Slowly I'm going back in time. Week by week I descend back into blackness. So many truths. So many truths about me and absolutely nothing about you. It's like you never existed. Did you ever? My floor is covered in letters. My face is wet from crying. By the time mum gets here there's no sign of the letters or my crying. The garbage bag is full, mum offers to chuck it on her way back home. I nod. There's nothing for me in that bag anyway.



And the letters that you never meant to send, got lost and thrown away.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I should have known better …

By
Last week was my husbands last week of summer holiday and I had thought that with him wanting to be as much as possible with the kids I could get some writing done. Yeah right! Who was I kidding! Tuesday morning I woke with a sore throat and a few hours after that my voice was gone So instead of sitting down at my laptop, I lay flat out on the sofa drinking tea and feeling sorry for myself. The day after Pumpkin started to sneeze, and we had some fun nights with a very fussy baby resulting in me feeling even more poorly. All the writing and editing I had planned didn’t happen, but I did get to write some poetry.
4 comments
Read more

A Room of One’s Own

By
It was Virginia Woolf who said that women need a room of their own, a room where we will be able to write (fiction more specifically). I was lucky in that respect when I began to read and then later on when I started to write poetry and prose as a teenager. I was always encouraged to both read and write, and my father would take me to the library and introduce me to the wonderful world that is Science Fiction. Growing up I was sort of an only child, I never had to share my space with anyone. Okay, the “sort of an only child”-thing might need some explaining. My older sister, by 6 years, was severely handicapped ( Retts Syndrome ), so we could never have any kind of sisterly bond or do anything together. When she was 17 she died from heart failure, leaving my parents and I to continue life without her. Yes, it was an easier life because she needed so much help and we could never take any long trips; or if we did my parents had their hands full with her and sometimes I was l...
4 comments
Read more

I Killed Him!

By
I’ve started writing my novel again; maybe it’s being back at school that’s given me all these ideas. What I have so far is almost half a book, it needs more detail and some fleshing out and maybe some more drama before I can say it’s finished. A friend has been reading what I have so far and has been asking me questions about why and who and where, making me see that some things weren’t as clear as I thought they were. She also pointed out that one of my characters does nothing for the story. He just tags along, saying hardly anything and I realized that I put him in only because I wanted the boys and girls to be an equal number. So now, when I’m rewriting and adding he’s been cut out. I killed him. Well, maybe not anything as drastic as that, but he’s gone from the story. This changed the story some (duh), and it’s now better. There’s more focus on my main character and those closest to her. After dragging myself to the gym today I now really feel the need to get started with...
3 comments
Read more