[lj idol] week three | "but you know me, I'll be thinking of you..."
[an interlude...]
*
There is a letter.
The precise penmanship evident in the carefully printed lines, little more than his name and post office box number, has faded with the years that have passed. One corner is stamped, the dark ink bleeding a blue-black stain into the yellowing paper; another is bent with the tell-tale signs of repeated touch.
A single white sheet, unlined, he knows this from memory, is folded neatly and slotted inside. The words though, he has more trouble with those. He could barely bring himself to read them the first time around, he can’t recall having tried again since.
It is not the letter that matters, after all.
If he pulls the envelope from where it sits, filed alone in a drawer large enough to hold much more than just it, but doesn’t, he knows he could flip it over in his palm and read (and re-read and re-read) her address, printed in small script across one corner.
He doesn’t.
He doesn’t need to.
And the difference between those statements is telling.
Sometimes he likes to imagine that she wrote the details there deliberately, filled with a desperate kind of hopeful that he’d come looking for her. That he’d finally be the white knight she always dreamed of but never really seemed to need.
But it’s a fanciful notion and one he entertains only when the bottle of bourbon tipped to sideways on the kitchen sink is freshly emptied.
In the cold light of morning-after sobriety he knows her life has continued to spin without him in it. Just as his has resolutely continued on without her.
A fierce belief in this as the truth is no longer optional.
He fantasises sending her replies, plural. Imagines the words he’d write in each one. Can close his eyes and see them spelled out across page after page after page.
Hurt.
Betrayal.
Lust.
After all, they always were their best when they were at their worst.
They’d come back to him, he knows this. One after the other and then in bags all at once.
Return to Sender, they’d say.
Red stamped and unopened.
Unseen.
He could have it end no other way.
*
previously on...
introduction
jayus
the missing stair
*
There is a letter.
The precise penmanship evident in the carefully printed lines, little more than his name and post office box number, has faded with the years that have passed. One corner is stamped, the dark ink bleeding a blue-black stain into the yellowing paper; another is bent with the tell-tale signs of repeated touch.
A single white sheet, unlined, he knows this from memory, is folded neatly and slotted inside. The words though, he has more trouble with those. He could barely bring himself to read them the first time around, he can’t recall having tried again since.
It is not the letter that matters, after all.
If he pulls the envelope from where it sits, filed alone in a drawer large enough to hold much more than just it, but doesn’t, he knows he could flip it over in his palm and read (and re-read and re-read) her address, printed in small script across one corner.
He doesn’t.
He doesn’t need to.
And the difference between those statements is telling.
Sometimes he likes to imagine that she wrote the details there deliberately, filled with a desperate kind of hopeful that he’d come looking for her. That he’d finally be the white knight she always dreamed of but never really seemed to need.
But it’s a fanciful notion and one he entertains only when the bottle of bourbon tipped to sideways on the kitchen sink is freshly emptied.
In the cold light of morning-after sobriety he knows her life has continued to spin without him in it. Just as his has resolutely continued on without her.
A fierce belief in this as the truth is no longer optional.
He fantasises sending her replies, plural. Imagines the words he’d write in each one. Can close his eyes and see them spelled out across page after page after page.
Hurt.
Betrayal.
Lust.
After all, they always were their best when they were at their worst.
They’d come back to him, he knows this. One after the other and then in bags all at once.
Return to Sender, they’d say.
Red stamped and unopened.
Unseen.
He could have it end no other way.
*
previously on...
introduction
jayus
the missing stair