Tell

I promise to write letters that use distinctive quotes from literature.

 

I promise to use footnotes to firmly embed the quotes and provide a structure many letters lack.

 

I tell him I would much rather write a letter and send it by Royal Mail than attempt phonecalls. Letters have an ancient structure you can depend on.

 

I tell him autistic women require a beginning, a middle and an end otherwise they will become entrenched in a damaging psychological loop. Treat letter writing like any other narrative, I say, like an articulate conversation where there is give and take, then white space to symbolise pauses.

 

I tell him folk know, with a letter, what to expect and how I adore that all the best letter writers take you completely off piste and face plant you in bright blue snow, making you question if such staggering art could even be considered to be a letter.

 

I tell him I have re-read The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf thirty-one times.

 

The wait for a letter to arrive is like the quiet patience required when friendship is morphing into next base. A worthy wait, indeed. A silent wanting that accumulates like fast snow at a maroon back gate.

 

I tell him Oh My! When a letter is hand delivered, flippety flop, through the door. Even the folds of a letter are satisfying to touch. Ice-cream shades of paper. Bold, expensive ink.

 

I tell him I am obsessed by this overused introduction : At the time of writing.

 

I tell him: At the time of writing speaks of time, temporality, the flinch of moments already gone.

 

I tell him I stilll have letters from my late grandfather about his mariner-style DFS sofa and the pools man who was a bit of a berk. I can never meet my grandfather again, but I still have his expletives in neat cursive, the ghost of his voice in Bic navy, and the careful creases he made with large honey bear paws.

 

I tell him I get fixated on the following: the origin of the coloured stamps and the post-office’s inky date that marks a time already past and the physical marks he makes on paper that will give me nostalgia about his animated, horse-racing speed voice in person.

 

I tell him I still have letters from men who doodled me loopy romantic script on classy feint-lined Basildon Bond, that I have neon fruit-scented cartoons girlfriends did on air mail pages.

 

I tell him an illiterate boyfriend signed off a letter in adolescence with Goodnight Sweat Heart, how severely it gave me the ick.

 

I tell him I will get ever so distressed about the small details and say I am so sorry. Intimate details I cannot bear to talk about such as whether he licks the envelope gum or not.

 

I tell him Michael Kimball’s Write your life story on a postcard book nails people’s lives right down to their very essence on one side of a postcard. The trick, Kimball says, is to write really small.

 

I tell him I will sometimes write so small that he will question whether I have actually written to him at all. I tell him this is folklore, some magic trick.

 

I tell him that in adolescence I designed my own coded abbreviations in letters to a former boyfriend in the Royal Marines. How we used our own neologies.

 

I tell him about the secret love language my last partner and I invented, how we substituted vowels, reversed the opening letters of linked words. I tell him how the loss of such a precious shared language is like rupture // a forced break.

 

I tell him I’ve got this thing about shopping lists. That I am one of those collectors. I tell him I am not a female version of John Fowle’s Frederick Cleg and how people get offended by my fetish with other people’s trolley debris.

 

I tell him I peer inside discarded trollies for scribbled on till receipts and serviettes, my heart knocking out a bim-bam with velvet excitement.

 

I explain there was once a well-thumbed copy of Anthony Burgess’ ‘Clockwork Orange’ left on Asda’s Aisle 31, how it had eggiwegs, maslo, jammiwam and chai written across its iconic cog-eyed front cover in terrible script. I tell him it had to come home with me.

 

I tell him I am still uncertain if taking the book made it ‘found’ or ‘nicked.’

 

I tell him it’s the brevity of the shoppimg lists that I love, the natural poetry that presents in every list of essentials, and the personal anecdotes people add that make them gorgeous micro-fictions:

 

Ham (synthetic) 

 

Galaxy. I do / don’t deserve it

 

Fly biscuits. Cheap.

 

Something for Ted (a factory handling nuts is fine / rapeseed = bad)

 

If you get more tinned tomatoes, I’ll kill you.

 

I text to say that I can send him a shopping list with a letter.

 

He doesn’t reply.

 

I text to say I feel sorry for people who do not see the pureness of the everyman in lists scribed for their shopping.

 

He texts to ask for new book recommendations.

 

I text to say that Claire Louise Bennett is a genius. Her monologue style playful humour folds me. Sandrine Ndahiro writes with devastating beauty. Han Kang’s work is stylish yet haunting. Anne Carson writes the big stuff. Owen Booth can turn his fountain pen to any literary form. Naoise Dolan is a lighthouse, plus, she despises ‘show don’t tell’ which makes my own neurology when writing feel more valid. Ferdia Lennon is profoundly brilliant.

 

He texts back: Thank you, sweetheart. I think it’s high time we write letters.