I received the first in the mail

March 2010

Dear,

I wonder where you are now, as you are reading this. 'What did you do today?' Many of them will always ask what you are doing, and are more concerned with the things that happened to you on the outside rather than the things that happen inside. Did you stumble through your door into the security of your impossibly messy room, only to find an envelope laid out on an unused surface which is hard to come by in this middle of these clutter. Will you remember the afternoon you had, putting up frames on the wall, and trying to work out an unbeatable combination of frames? There is no turning back once the holes are drilled, no room for regret in this squashed place with small walls. And when you are halfway through and sitting on your mattress, looking around, what should call then, but Mr Void knocking lightly at the door of your soul. Or more specifically, at the empty door frame of your soul?

Wait, and who decides that there shouldn't be a door; the few-minutes-ago self who wrote that very sentence and pinned it into an unchangeable ink and white-background reality, the self who sat there aching at the frames not yet up but supposedly secured with set-up spots of blankness on the walls, or the self who clings on impossibly tight to that bit breath of Destiny who is uncontrollable, and dishes out lemons and downpours to beings all around the globe?

To have pretty things, but not feel pretty. To be surrounded by what is called art and other clever designs, but left to drown in deepening pools of miscellaneous souls or someone's pocket that is filled with scarred stones. To have this warm corner to call your own, and to be washed away by a draft of lemon rain.

Of all the cards in this series, horrid-looking as they frankly are, I still believe they deserve to be mailed out and unwrapped by earnest fingers. This slogan on the front echoes deep, as deep as a coin that could not audibly stir the bottom of a well. A well in a forest that nobody knows of, that has trees that never grow old and do not not say a word. They merely ruffle their branches over your head and let one of their own green drift downwards to the feet, but not before capitalizing on this 'frozen in mid air' moment. A fishing line has been spun outwards, holding all things together, suspending this half-awake heart that is finally heading to a new place and choosing to not know that it is a breath closer to numbered days - one, second, next, a crinkle and a goodbye unsaid. Though you have already touched my toe once, for the first time.

It was yet another Sunday afternoon across the car-park shrouded in sunlight, and into her car. "This is a sad song," she says as it starts playing on the radio. Ahead of us, a single brown leaf happens to lose its footing and to tumble down from the same place it has been for its entire lifetime. The wind teases, as the leaf now dives to its death in play-pause-play stages, not unlike the stages we undergo in life. It is a pause for me right here, right now and it falls with silent bravado that arrests my self, which is sitting in that metal but transparent vehicle (I can be sprawled across the road watching the leaf, in another version) and another self is clenching my sides and not breathing, watching it die.

For in dying, it lived beautifully.

"Remember that."

Love,