I've Loved You So Long

February is always the cruellest month for me. If it was simply down to the fact that I was just dog–tired of the long dark nights and bitter cold then I’d be pleased for there to be such a simple explanation. Instead there are many more components that entangle me in this pit of introspection, most of which I’ll try not to bore you with.

This time around I thought I’d found the perfect antidote to pass all this by, but as it turned out that wasn’t the case. It should of, but rooting around in the filing cabinets for some pertinent background material I happened upon a file filled with the many cards and handwritten letters from The One That Got Away. If I’d had any sense I’d have seen what the contents were and then pushed it to the back of the drawer. But for anyone who has read just a few months of these posts will know that, to put it not so delicately, she is the itch I cannot stop scratching.

There is a valid reason for being unable to let the memory of her go, rather that it simply being some silly fancy. So I have that, not that it really does me any good. When we started going out, initially kept apart by holidays in the Far East on her part, long hours working on The Rabbit on mine, and then only seeing each other twice or (at best) three times a week, we’d fill in the gaps by writing each other letters about the day we’d had to whatever came to mind. Now I suppose it would be done with emails or texts of these ridiculous tweets so I suppose I should be grateful in a way for having this sheaf of missives, all gracefully written with a fountain pen.

Being very careful and selective as I leafed through the pages, I happened upon the very first note she had sent me, not long after I had graduated and just months before my first short story was to be published in a new anthology. Giving only her address and no telephone number, necessitating a written reply (which I suppose is where the continued correspondence started off), she had written:

They told me today that you write;
so what do you write?

Yours faithfully

[name]

very, very nearly third year graphics

Just reading that again earlier this evening, the peremptory nature of the letter made me smile until I glanced up at the date written in the top left hand corner of page before the address: 20/07/87. Had it been that long? That’s now just over half my lifetime ago. Obviously there’s no way to go back and change the past, more’s the pity, but I wonder – especially at the end of a day like today – if things would have been better if I’d never fed that very first sheet of paper into the typewriter and just got on with designing cereal boxes instead.