Monday, January 11, 2010

You've got mail but thankfully no Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks.

I have a pen friend. Did you know this? We’ve been writing to each other for about 5 years now, maybe even longer. We’ve met I think all of twice. Our relationship is not based on fact nor does it have any grounds in reality, our relationship charts the unnamable. We never talk about what we are doing with our lives, the closest we come is sometimes we talk about what we’ve done, but only in passing reference. More often than not our postcards are random and of the bizarre, one of the last ones she sent me was a mathematical equation for how many molecules of iron there are in the human blood stream. She’s smarter than me that’s for sure.

The thing is, I want to tell her how much it means to me that someone will take the time out to write to me, will sit down and make a card out of scraps and then take the time to walk it down to the mailbox. But I can’t you see, because it seems an unspoken rule that we never discuss what’s happening, I can never call her up and say “How cool is they hey? How much are we like Griffin and Sabine, we are literary characters in a novel of our own devising, the end remains unwritten, maybe someone will make a film about us later” but I never can because A) what we have only exists between us and no one else and B) I am not that sort of wanker that would want a film made about him.

As much as this friendship exists, it doesn’t. I guess this is the closest I’ll ever come to real magic, something that is both real and imaginary at the same time. I could write to her today and then maybe never hear from her again and the only thing that I would have to prove that she ever existed would be a stack of beautifully written postcards.

And this is not some ‘postsecret’ type thing. That shit sucks.

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