I’m watching fairy lights twinkle along my bedroom shelf as I stare at a black laptop screen. Glass of wine in one hand, phone in the other, the room is quickly filling with the scent of my Love Letters candle.
Love letters… the closest to these being the old keepsakes in a tin under my bed and the cinema ticket tucked behind a photo frame. Love letters are made to last, but sometimes the love doesn’t. That’s life, but what about the emotional keepsakes? What is the equivalent of old cinema tickets and heart-holding teddy bears? Chances are they last just as long as the letters.
For me, modern love letters are rarely sent even though we have a million and one ways to, they’re the phone notes of everything you want to say, because let’s face it, we’ve all typed out that one last text we will never send him. It’s usually perfected in anger, accompanied by a “I don’t even care if he doesn’t reply, he just needs to know how I feel!!” The reality of this? Ermmm, I’ve had a good sleep and have decided not to send this 48 paragraph essay describing every traumatic feeling he’s ever put me through. Now I could be wrong, but it suddenly doesn’t seem as romantic and movie-like if he opens this sassy message while he’s happy out in work today – “Right, a packet of hunky doreys, two jambons, any fuel? And what do you reckon about this message? Should I leave her on read or argue with her about the holes in paragraph 17?”
Similarly to this, I once planned to post a letter to the house of a guy who kept messing me around, the thing is, he could never reply to two questions in a single text so I’m not sure why I expected an owl to deliver his delicately written, thought-provoking response letter that would look like it had been soaked with a teabag. Yeah, I saved the paper for a rainy day. Might scribble his name on it and burn it instead.
On reflection, maybe I write love letters on the daily. They’re in my poems, lessons and stories I tell here. And as for the emotional keepsakes, we all have them, it means something different to everybody. They have the power to sadden us and make us smile, because every relationship we’ve had is an old cinema ticket, tucked away somewhere safe to reflect on, but hidden away enough not to hold us back when we’re ready to buy new popcorn.
