Letters to nobody

For about three years I have written letters I do not send. Not a journal - a journal is addressed to yourself and reads like it. These are addressed to a specific person, dated, folded, and put in a box in the bottom of the wardrobe, and there are now sixty-odd of them.

I started with one to my father, eighteen months after he died, because there was a thing about the shed I needed to tell him and there was nowhere to put it. I have written eleven more to him since. The rest are to living people, which is stranger, and I want to try to explain why it is not as sad as it sounds.

The form does the work

A letter has a shape. You have to greet someone, you have to account for the gap since you last wrote, and you have to end. That structure forces a kind of honesty a journal never manages, because a journal can spiral for four pages and a letter cannot - you would not do that to a person.

And it must be handwritten. I tried it typed and it came out as an argument. My handwriting is not fast enough for an argument. By the time the sentence reaches the page it has been through the slow filter of the hand, and what comes out is milder and truer than what went in.

Why they are not sent

Some are not sendable - the recipient is dead, or we are not in contact, or the letter is about them in a way they have not asked to hear. But most are simply not for sending. A sent letter creates an obligation to reply and changes what it is. Unsent, the letter is entirely mine, and I can be wrong in it without anyone having to manage my wrongness.

Twice I have written one, kept it a fortnight, and then said the substance of it out loud to the person. Both times the conversation went well, and I do not think it would have if I had gone in unrehearsed. That is probably the most practical use of the practice.

The box

I reread them once a year, in the week between Christmas and New Year, which has become the only ritual I keep with any consistency. It is not a comfortable hour. Some of the letters from three years ago are written by someone I would like to shake gently. But a person who never sees their own handwriting from three years ago has to take their own word for how much has changed, and the box means I do not have to.

My instruction to my family, said out loud twice so it counts, is that the box is not to be read and is to be burnt. That may be cowardice. I have decided it is allowed to be.