hard copy hand-writing

Hand writing because the keyboard doesn’t allow for slashing and tearing. A good note, pressed into some crippled origami creature —  It beats a machine-printed letter most days.  Length does matter.  My penmanship holds its form for a page and a half.  After that, the shakes and shivers come in like an alcoholic on Sunday morning. 

Let the corners droop in dog-ear fashion.  Play the game with spelling errors.  If one word bends on itself at the edge of the page, that only adds to the ambiance.  They’ll know you wrote in dim light, on an uneven surface, in the shaking cab of a train or truck or free falling from a burning building.

Do it by hand.  Give the goddam thing a soul and some weight.  All effort considered, it should be deposited in the nearest recycling bucket after reading.  The message has been sent.  Shoot the messenger.  There’s no good use in holding a bunch of misspelled notes hostage.  Use them to line the parakeet cage.  Build them into paper airplanes and launch them into the chimney.  Cut them into confetti and blast them from the ceiling at your next party.

That’s what I like most about notes.  Even when cared for, they deteriorate.  It all erodes, as it should.  Parking tickets, love notes, finger-painting, and Shakespeare’s originals — they all break down into nothing over time.

Much like my hand-writing, a letter is meant to deliver a message, one skull to the next, anything more is a stoke of luck.  The greatest words of all time wilt to the rain and the wind. Even the great mountains erode to sand.  Shapes morph and flatten, ink fades, and all that’s left is a memory, and a new moment.