Love letters straight from the heart

(This all came into my head after reading this. Miss Malice is one of the coolest people alive).

***

You wouldn’t believe it now, but there was once a time where I was moving about so much that I didn’t even live out of a suitcase, because that would’ve been too big and slowed me down too much; no, I lived out of plastic shopping bags. Because I was traipsing around the country so much for various reasons, it seemed like everything I owned lived in these plastic bags; books, clothes, music, letters. My life looked as if it’d been bought wholesale from Tesco or Boots the Chemist.

What was theoretically my “base” was my old bedroom at my parents house (where I’m now based, still waiting on phone calls; my life now being a Sam Beckett play. And no, I’m not talking about the guy who “Quantum Leap”ed his way around time for a series of dull morality plays, either), and to go into it at that time was to risk death by plastic. The floor was covered in countless bags each with their own history and their own worth, from the issues of “Transformers” that I’d saved all the way from my bowlcut days of 1984 to sketchbooks full of ideas and experiments gone wrong that no-one would ever be allowed to see; a cut-rate Aladdin’s Cave of nostalgic treasure. Of course, because this was at my parents’ house, I’d get phone calls from my mum complaining of the mess the bags were causing and how it was a waste of a good room and all the usual complaints, always followed up the usual threats that if I didn’t do anything about it, then she would.

I never thought she actually MEANT it.

I got home one weekend, to find the floor clear, and a satisfied mum telling me that she’d gone through everything in the bags and “put it all away neatly”, just the way she’d tell me the same things when I was seven and I’d come home from school to find all my toys torn from the dramatic point at which they’d been left that morning, Darth Vader poised to defeat Han Solo even with the big winter coat he was wearing. Of course, I was panicking inside when I saw the carpet again after so long, and asked her if she’d thrown anything out in the middle of her cleaning. “Oh, just some scrap papers,” she said, dismissively. No problem there, then.

Cut to weeks later, and trying to get something for my MA work, I’m desperately looking for the letters I’d got years ago from Rachel, my first real girlfriend... only, they’re nowhere to be found. I look through the piles of letters hidden in drawers and cupboards, through the perfumed love letters of later girlfriends with lipsticked envelopes stained with chemicals kisses separating and through countless old birthday cards or good luck tales for things I couldn’t remember, and they’re nowhere to be found. And then it dawns on me what the “scrap papers” my mum’d unknowingly thrown out really had been.

Rachel’s letters were that summer for me; the only proof I really had left, beside memory. I only had a handful of photos of her and none of us together, and the letters (full of nervous jokes and hopeful kindness, small x-shaped kisses hidden under her name and words like smiles on her face) were the only thing I felt like I had that were really from the time we spent together. They were the first love letters I’d ever received and were ridiculously magical, the start of one of the most important and enjoyable times of my life beginning with her phone number and invitation to Edinburgh at the end of the first one (sneakily after talking about everything else to put me at ease; and me, put so much at ease I wasn’t sure if she’d really asked me out or not but saying yes anyway). And they were gone.

It was the strangest feeling, afterwards. I felt like an important part of my past had been stolen away by mistake or something; that the last link I’d had to Rachel (even though we’d not spoken for years at this point, because she’d moved to America and we’d lost touch the way you always say you don’t want to) had been lost. Somewhere in my head, melodramatic though it sounds, I felt like I’d killed her by accident.

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Copyright © Grim, 2002