A letter.
I wrote her today to say nothing in particular. The thoughts of the world had been swirling around my head and I thought I could get some of them captured like fireflies in a jar, but all that came out was some trite ramblings.
The ink on the paper, which filled the shallow rivers and reservoirs etched into the paper with the stylus of the pen was worth more than the words they formed. All the lines were dumb, I knew it as I wrote it, and I sent the words out anyway, in an envelope with a stamp and her name on it. Her address too. Sent it in the mail, something no one does anymore, I could have easily started to type her name into the TO: section of the mail program on my computer and after three letters her email address would have popped up, but if I emailed the words would be even more disposable than they already were. At least on paper there felt like permanence would be made, even though I knew she would probably only throw it away anyway. She was that kind of person; she threw everything away, all the time. She was always getting rid of things, always decluttering her life, while my own life was being cluttered all the time. Almost every letter I ever received kept, not organized, just kept, everything people gave me kept. Things I found which reminded me of good days or the absolute shittiest days kept.
Sometimes I wondered what her memory was like, with out the tangible things to remind her of things in the past. I kept my life triggered for Proustian reminders, she kept it bare, nothing more than a few months old, she had no trouble throwing away anything, ridding herself of her things. I didn’t know why she still kept me around, a cluttered mindfuck of a person who strapped all of his baggage onto his back and then tattooed each day deeply into himself, mostly in invisible ink that only I could feel but which I felt every time I let the creeping hands of my mind wander outside of it’s immediate concerns.
I now forget what exactly I wrote to her. The words have already left me, and I think that in the past people wrote their letters on carbon paper to keep their own copies. I think too that we do this now, only we call it an outbox, or sent messages or something and it’s on our computer, or we save our chats in some folder in some other folder in some location on a hard dive and we keep it until the computer needs replacing and we rid ourselves of those moments that are past. Those moments maybe deserve to be gotten rid of though, with the LOL’s, and BRB and emoticons and all the other quick keystrokes we have reduced our common communication to. Now that I think of it, I wrote that people no longer write. That people are always ‘in touch’ but never say anything, and that the epistolatory novel written in the form of emails going back and forth is a low form of fiction and should be ignored by any serious person.
That’s what I wrote her. And I have no idea why.
