Three Letters
by: Nels Schifano
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Maybe that's why I am writing this letter. Perhaps it's thinking about England in the summer, perhaps it's the sounds of the river at night but my mind wandered back to the place of long afternoons, listening to Pink Moon and Lay Lady Lay. Can you still find a way back to the taste of cheap wine, the feel of grass between your fingers and a world that was all shimmering reflections?
All those people disappeared into the world. How would they be recognised now - perhaps only by the sound of their laughter?
I'm afraid I once damaged the environment in your name and took a penknife to the willow we used to sit by. I can remember wondering if the bark would ever grow back. If you ever find yourself driving past one weekend . . . Well perhaps not, it's probably so sadly different. But I know your name will still be there, carved in the memory of a tree.
*
She re-folded the letter and tapped it several times against her top lip. From the hall the clock calling out the quarter hour, then a moment of stillness - time stalling - before, faintly, the clock in her study responded.
She took out the next envelope. While her fingers searched for the flap she looked at the Queen's silver silhouette. The letter was written on paper so white and thin that as her gaze fell across it she saw it as a shade of blue. The date was April 1976.
*
Do I remember that September afternoon when I first met you? Is it possible to remember the slide into sleep or the hypnotist's fingers on your eyelids? I only know that it happened because at some stage I awoke.
Some things are clear, the lucid fragments of a dream, a conversation over the phone one Easter. We both felt down because I was working in a stuffy shop and you in a sorting office. I hated it and asked you how it was that time moved so slowly. It's okay, you said, it doesn't matter, because it will end and time passed is all the same, and anyway, in the end it's not time that you're left with.
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