Day 113: Writing someone you don't know
THE dice review a list of things to do as I get comfortable in Sound Coffee. I've got time to kill before the Nan boat races, so I've buckled down to get some work done.
Sorting through a pile of postcards that I've been lugging around since Bangkok, I find the right one for my Grandmother. Further into the pile, I start writing the children of one of my cousins. He and his wife have three beautiful kids. Though I've only met two of them, it seems unfair not to write to the little boy, who I've never met.
I start writing.
As my imagination drifts, a sadness creeps inside my chest. It's strange to write a letter or postcard to someone you don't know, even if they're only a few years old. The sadness isn't from not knowing the little man yet – there is plenty of time for me to meet him at some family reunion – it's my imagination as it hovers around the idea of a middle-aged man writing his own children. Children who don't know his name, his face, the tenor of his voice. Though the situation is fictitious, at least for me, the feeling, at least the start of the feeling, is tangible.
I gently rock the feeling, cradling the sadness before the dice send me off on another assignment.