Late night letter

Hey. How's it going? It's late and I can't sleep (due to a tremendously long weekend during which I might've allowed myself to sleep in a little too much) so I'm writing a letter. Who to? Who knows?! Whoever will read this, whoever you may be. Yes, that's right - to you. So how are you? I'm pretty good, just trying not to think too much. Writing seems to put things in order, line things up in a sequence of cause and effect, of given and new, of chronology or merely sets of three. When you write something down, you think about it differently, you externalise issues, you adopt a new perspective. Of course when I write 'you' I mean 'me'. Writing in the second person is probably part of that externalising process, and less pretentious in English than the third person. You may be wondering what's the point to this (and this time I mean you the reader, not you-who-is-actually-me). I've written many letters like this over the years: in journals for a future self to read over and be reassured that life is better than it was, to usually distant friends prepared to put up with my rambling emails and perhaps respond in kind. And now the blog, the modern open diary that may still be just as hidden for
none but the invited few to see as the symbolically padlocked diary of younger years. Why write where others may read? For validation, inevitably. That others may either praise what we* suspect is unique in ourselves or reassure that we are normal for they too feel the
same. Ideally, both, without it being at all problematic in its opposition. And here we come to the inevitable conclusion of such writings: an abstracted generalisation followed by a self-conscious and self-deprecating coda. And do I feel better for this?

I reached the limit of my character count for email on my phone before I was able to decide.

*Note the use of 'we' at this point, assuming you are like me, and we experience this together.

Riverside

Sitting by the river. Technically an autumn day but I can see nothing to suggest that except for two grey clouds. When the sun escapes them, it's warm enough you can almost forget that winter's coming. Two swans
sail past, and a pelican, and numerous ducks which which occasionally guffaw as if one of them has made a huge social gaffe. Then there's the birds I don't know the name of but which occasionally sound like a small child who has just discovered that a short burst of high-pitched screaming gets a funny response from their parents. In the sun something glistens on my black jeans and I see a tiny white spider inexplicably building a web on my knee before I'm obliged to brush it off. Uni students lounge between classes, reluctant to leave their friends, or cross the foot bridge to their cars. Up river a man is fishing, which is unusual on a river in the middle of the city. The pelican stands on the bank between the fisherman and a group of international students.

It feels still, but the birds are noisy, and the students are talking and laughing. I can hear cars passing and a plane decending for landing at the airport. And just once, when it was a little more still, or the now non-existant wind was in the right direction, I heard monkeys whooping in the zoo. The sun goes away and a young man climbs into the struts under the footbridge, undoubtedly to impress one of the girls in a group nearby, but he seems to quickly realise he can't go far and stands poised above them. Half a dozen skateboarders glide over the footbridge, each making a loud clatter over one loose plank. Now the highschool kids are out, and joggers and cyclists.

I'm reluctant to leave, but such is life.