Instalment XXX – wherein our little heroine is dirty thirty and keeping secrets

Tales from the Tropics

If I’m learning at least one thing, it’s how to use roman numerals. What a handy skill. It kept Bart Simpson alive once, haters. Happy 30th instalment to me. Now my blog and I are both lying about our real ages together. Forever young.

This morning I woke up emotionally wrung out but less crazy. What a strange thing to feel. How much money would you give to be in someone else’s head? I write a lot of emails to people and I guess this is the closest thing to letters we get these days and the closest thing to being let into someone’s head. It’s really interesting once they start opening up and the emails begin to get a little bit longer. You start to feel reconnected to the person because you can hear their syntax in their writing. Death to the text message. I write unapologetically and unselfconsciously long ones. People comment. Whatever.

I feel a great intimacy in handwriting. Digital media killed the radio star, TV killed the VCR. There are people that I’ve known probably close to ten years and never once have I seen their handwriting. That’s weird right? Why would you? You wont even get a birthday card these days, you’ll get a facebook montage of you looking heinous. Pro tip- approve your time line, your ugly side can be screenshotted and meme’d any moment. There’s something a little bit secret and private and voyeuristic about handwriting. Like when you first start going out with a boy and you see their shopping list or a note, anything handwritten. It almost feels like you just walked in on them naked in the shower.

I don’t have any grand conclusion today. I’m not even that sure what I’m saying. I want to write about a letter writing relationship I had with my friend but it’s too close. There’s something greedy about it like if I give over the information I don’t own our relationship fully anymore. Like keeping someone’s secrets keeps them a part of you forever.

xx SJ

Comments are closed.