RSVP

Dear Mr and Mrs P,

Many thanks for your kind invitation to the wedding of your daughter J to her long-time fiance R.

Although it has been some time since I last saw them, I regard J and R as dear friends, having known them both since university days, now more than a decade ago.  Indeed it may even have been me that first introduced them, and I'm very happy to learn of their marriage after all these years together.

So it is with deep regret that I must write to confirm that I am unable to attend the wedding. 

I am unable to attend because, while only I opened the letter containing your invitation this morning, the wedding itself took place a little over three years ago.

You will probably be wondering exactly why it has taken me so long to open your letter.  I can assure you it was nothing specific to your letter.  In fact - with the exception of a few expected or angry-looking items - until recently I hadn't been opening any of my post.  Nor any of my landlord's post, nor that of any of the various young, single professionals who have rented this flat before me.  Nor the endless flyers, takeaway menus and other brightly-coloured paper crap that spill through a London front door.  For some years.

I didn't open it, because I couldn't deal with it.  I know how crazy that sounds.  I don't understand the reasons myself, other than to compare it to some form of social anxiety, a fear of what the letters might hold, or the interaction with other people they might entail.  Like not returning someone's calls, or making up excuses not to go to a party.  So instead of opening it, I stuffed into drawers, stacked it into shoe boxes and deliberately slid it down the back of the sofa until it, and all the other rubbish I wasn't throwing away, first filled every space, then covered every surface, of my flat.

And every day I didn't deal with it, the harder to deal with it got.  A building burden of fear and guilt.  Throbbing away in my flat like a slowly-swelling lump you dread going to the see the Doctor about.  And all the while a growing white drift of envelopes in the hallway, getting harder and harder to plough back with the front door each time I came home from work.

You will be glad to hear that things have changed.  Over the past year or so I have been making the necessary structural changes to my life to enable a fresh start.  As part of that journey I have recently found the strength to begin, a little at a time, sorting my way through the mess.  Keeping a few important letters, binning the rest, and nervously opening the ones where I couldn't be sure.  Digging further into history with each layer, like something between "Time Team" and "A Life Of Grime".  I have now finished, having dug just past your invitation to the bottom - all the way back to the end of 2003 which, I think we can assume, must have been about the time things started to go wrong.

During this process I have been able to piece together quite a lot about what has been happening in my, erm, absence.

I have noted with interest how, on a regular basis, new and exciting-looking chinese, indian and pizza delivery firms proclaim themselves newly-open for business in my local area.  But while their names are very different, the new firms seem to have suspiciously similar phone numbers, addresses and indeed food to one of the firms that existed before. I worry whether former tenant Mr S ever got in touch with his poor mother in France, or if London Energy ever managed to pin him down for that last bill.  And I wonder whether Miss M's former employer ever caught up with her over the arrangements for transferring her pension, or if she ever took up any of those offers on trekking holidays. 

I seem to have missed quite a few elections for mayors, local councillors and the like.  I imagine my landlord was surprised to get a fine for whatever traffic-related offence he seems to have committed, possibly a result of him neglecting to renew his license.  My monthly mobile phone bills have been much larger than I would have expected.  On the upside, I will confide that there is rather more money in my bank account than I would have guessed. 

I have also been re-acquainted with the colour of my living-room carpet: brown, just as I remember it.

Mr and Mrs P, I'm sorry I missed the wedding.  And the fact that my friends had even got married.  And all the other things I've probably missed.  In future, post will be opened and dealt with straightaway, or forwarded to my landlord, or thrown away if it is junk, or posted back to the delivering address with the message "no longer at this address" if it is for someone else.  Along with the post, all the other paper crap I was keeping for no reason has also been dealt with.  Everything has now either been neatly filed or thrown away. 

Everything, that is, except a tiny fraction.  From each year, I have deliberately kept a representative sample - of the receipts, the tickets stubs, the business cards, the restaurant chits, chaff, kipple, knick-knacks and other emphemera.  The things that the everyday folks leave behind.  Each scrap just enough to trigger a memory, to piece together what I was doing at the time.  This will be all that I keep from now on: a strict limit of one boxfile-full for each year of my life.  I have them all lined up on my shelf now, each distilled from a skipload of rubbish.  Collectively they will form a physical record, better than a diary. 

I trust that your dear daughter J will not marry again.  But if she does, I hope that you will think to invite me to the wedding.  I hope you can understand that my failure to reply to your invitation was not a deliberate snub to you or your family, but rather a consequence of my slow, undiagnosed slide into mental ill-health, from which I now appear to be making a recovery.

I hope you will also understand that I will never send you this rather overdue and overlong reply.  But I have kept your expensive-looking invitation, still in its envelope, in my boxfile for 2004.

Yours Faithfully,

The Overnight Editor

Comments

[Peach]

Grrrrrrrr. I'm right with you on this. I don't consider it a decline in mental health, I don't open my mail more than twice a month. My housemate is disgusted, him being a excel spreadsheet thinking accountant.

All this sodding STUFF shoved into your life through a hole in your door, I mean, it's like they're RAPING the house; I have been considering wiring the letter box shut with a note outside saying, You Need My Consent To Insert Your Correspondence In My Box, You Fuckers.

Still, well done on the sorting. I have still to start mine.

[clarissa]

I don't know what I want more:

To rummage through your boxes (chronologically) or to send you something that you keep in a box.

[isabelle]

I'd like you to have some isabelle kipple on your shelf in your box for 2007......

[f:lux]

Now primed for the (Philip K. Dick) easter egg... but unprepared for the sudden wonderings about my own unbloody going postal (oh fuck, do I have to now open my mail...)

[An Unreliable Witness]

I got momentarily distracted there because Peach's comment scared me a little. I would be a bit worried if I knew any postmen.

I like boxes. Long people-shaped boxes. If they've got letterboxes built in the sides of them, all the better. We all need to still get Christmas cards when we're dead.

[Beth]

I like the notion that you keep stuff, little mementos of things for each year. I sort of expected you to do that by accident than by design.

You should always keep an eye out for wedding invites in future though. There are usually vulnerable women to screw. And if there isnt that there's usually free booze - neither are bad!

[pocketpunk]

we dont use a box in our house ...we use the wall and the fridge and well ...er ...pretty much like any flat surface.....oh yeah and the car.......I live in a shit tip dont I .....

[pocketpunk]

do u also collect inanimate objects and other rubbish.....

kicking a pebble/stone along a path more than 5 or so times makes it a sentient being.....I have many twig and pebble friends.....

[Ben]

Gosh, written mail. Post.

I think 2004 was the last time I received any.

[Timbo]

Dear OE,

I've awarded you my Blog of the Month Swampy award for May because I think you're bloody great!

Your prize is found here:
http://timtim.typepad.com/timboland/swampyaward2007.gif

And the diddy little write-up I've given you is here:
http://timtim.typepad.com/timboland/2007/06/loose_ends.html

So well done, bravo, and all that other stuff...

Timbo & The Swampy Awards Committee

[Miles Away]

(sorry for the lateness here!) such wonderful descriptive words. I sometimes wonder if going through old correspondence makes the past come back to life, slightly. What we have missed, what we did not miss, and what we wished to miss. Hope things are well.

[Callisto]

My brain is kipple-ridden, I like it when some non-kipple (ie like your rsvp) finds it's way in...

[Peach]

sorry to scare you UW - I clearly need a large guard dog

[Dandelion]

I want this to be Post Of The Week. You could be me.

Peach is right though. I consider post to be rather a lot like men. Some you like, some you don't. Some you long for, some you dread. And some just force their way in regardless. And you can't tell which is which just by looking at them.

[johnsons]

good gracious!thanks for this informative information.keep it up,goahead.

[Sarsparilla]

Mm. I didn't open my mail for three years, either. Then went through some of it and found a cheque for 200 from the taxman.

What I dont get is that if we dont open it, we still keep it. Why.

[Clare]

I love this post, but am now suffering from comment-box insecurity. So I am just waving and saying, you know, hello.