A note on letters

A Story by L.

An extract from a larger piece I've been writing.

I looked down at the page in my hand, feeling the supple texture of the paper with my fingertips, stroking the flattened pulp of fall trees, atom caressing atom. And I sat for a little while in a funny daze, having the strength only to kneel up and crawl my way under the duvet on my bed, curling up underneath it. The light shone through the holes and lighter pieces of fabric, and I thought myself in my own little world for a while. A strange kind of sadness washed over me, the kind that doesn’t curl in your stomach like that letter curled in my fist. It lies down beside you and whispers sad little words in your ears. I let my eyelids flicker, the light making patterns between my lashes of blurred and peach-tinged fabric. I closed my eyes and lay there in the late afternoon, my shoed feet sticking out over side of the bed, clutching a letter from a girl whom I knew and yet did not know at all. I stayed there and rose later with the strange feeling that one gets in the aftermath of an unexpected nap. It was like coming out of the cinema, expecting broad daylight, and suddenly seeing the darkness that awaits your outside. Walking slowly downstairs in my crumpled uniform, and into the kitchen, I heard the laughter on the television, in the otherwise silent living room. There my mother, father and sister spent their evenings every night after dinner, and I never joined them. I suppose they were under the illusion I did so in order to keep up with my studies. Although it was rather more to do with keeping away from them, than keeping up with anything else. Standing in the kitchen, I toed my shoes off my feet without untying the laces, and looked gloomily into the fridge. It was whilst wondering if the corner shop might still be open, that I realised I must have missed the last post of the day, and that any reply I would send would reach her a day later than she might now expected. Smiling wryly to myself, I recalled how she had commended my promptness of exchange, and settled for a slice of bread and several spoons of jam from the larder. Returning up the stairs, I thought I heard the faint sound of my name being called. Again it came, and the voice I recognised as that of my sister’s calling me from the depths of the living, or as it seemed to me, the not so living room. I didn’t pause, and carried on up the stairs as if I had simply not heard her. Not that I disliked her in any way. I loved my sister dearly and we were often the closest of friends. But that evening a peculiar kind of melancholy had washed over me, and I felt very old and very sad. After eating, I sat in my room and stared blankly at the wallpaper for a while. There were a thousand and one things I was expected to be doing, but none of them appealed to me at all. I just sat and thought and thought for a while, and my introspect swallowed me into a kind of dream world, so much so that when I woke the next morning, I found I was already, rather disgustingly, dressed for school. I never discovered what it was that brought these sudden moods on, but I suspected at the time, and still do now, that it had something to do with the detachment of things. I knew a girl and in my mind she was growing and forming and shaping into a beautiful creature that wrote and spoke and walked about at her own accord. And she walked on the pages of the letters she wrote to me, too. But if I was to see her walking down the street towards me, I would never know it was her. I wouldn’t know by her voice, or her turn of phrase or the way she pinned her hair. I knew and knew nothing all at once and it was a rather bewildering thing to be. Something and yet nothing whatsoever. She was in equal parts everything and nothing to me, and the more the character I saw in my head walked about of her own accord, the more disinclined I was to converse and speak with people who did not exist inside of me " for they were flawed and messy and horribly real. And she was an invisible secret, a disappearing and reappearing companion of mine, and she was lovely, dark and deep like the poem I read scrawled into the back of an old copy of collected poetical works. She was the forest and I walked inside her as much as her shadow walked inside me.