Stop sending letters

“Stop sending letters,
Letters always get burned…”

Yesterday I took the day off work and spent the day walking through the suburbs.

There was no great motivation behind this, except to observe the lives and homes of the people around me. I climbed a few fences, had a look through the windows of some people. Though the weather was cold, I swam in a few pools, out here in the eastern suburbs there are more than you would think, at least from the size of the blocks, and from the outside of people’s houses.

I took the mail from several streets in my local area, where I could. Several houses had people either leaving, or returning, and this made it harder - however most people assumed that I was simply putting more junk mail in their box.

I’d taken a backpack with me, expressly for this purpose. It was really just for observation - I suppose the revulsion I felt after kicking in the Mercedes had startled me somewhat, and it felt like a foundation needed to be laid. I wanted to see what exactly
I was tying to question - wanted to know what the rules were.

It seems weird, because the further I get into this, the harder it becomes to work out what exactly I’m fighting against. In many ways the rules are what keep us fed and clothed, and it’s hard to walk naked and hungry once you’ve known that world.

But I now have a backpack full of letters to read. Fiction has not excited me this heartily in years. Of course, there are myriad account notices for mobile phones, parking tickets, health insurance, home loans etc, but buried amidst the mailbox graffiti there are little snippets of people’s lives. Written conversations - full of in jokes, awkward half-explanations, “love yous” and “wish you were here’s”, photographs of people smiling - none of which will ever find their recipients now, of course.

They’re easy to spot, the personal ones - they are usually addressed with scratchy blue or black biro text, numbers just inside the orange post-code boxes, screaming to get out (sounds familiar). Unfortunately there’s not nearly as many as their would have been ten years ago - if I had a passable hacking knowledge, I’m sure I’d find many more secret conversations - sexual, emotional, embarrassingly honest - immediate and harder than the constrained language we now save for the written counterpart.

So, I’ve saved a few, put them in an envelope, in a box of keepsakes. A time capsule of what will one day be “what was” when “what will be” has happened. It feels good to own these people’s words. To hold in my hands some part of their life that they will now never know. When they lay awake wondering why their child/partner/friend didn’t care enough to write - I’ll know.

The rest I burned in a bin in my backyard. I took some delight in being the end to all these little stories. Some of these people will get angry reminder notices, or maybe even court summons for these missed letters. I think I’m starting to learn again what this is all about, and what being outside of the game means.

It means power, it means control and means walking your own line, across the board, stealing other people’s cards and money, walking out the door and not giving a fuck about what ruin you leave behind - the lines you’ve crossed, the people you’ve left and the means to the end. Or maybe it’s all about disregarding even the idea that this is a bad thing - it’s just a different thing; a new way of thinking, a new way of walking and talking.

“…It’s not like the movies,
They fed us on little white lies.”
- Radiohead, “Motion Picture Soundtrack”