From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2024 at 11:23 PM
Subject: Pop. Pop Pop Pop Pop.

Did you really write nothing? Nothing at all? A grocery list doesn’t count. But a clever post-it, perhaps.

Honestly, I don’t know if I can write any more. I feel like some things I wrote were good, and now I’m covering them with bad writing. I guess it doesn’t matter since they’re buried already. No one is worried about the archives around here. I said that once; it’s in the archives somewhere.

Writing this letter / blog post, I feel as if I’ve got to actually put effort into sounding halfway not like an asshole. And for all the effort, I feel like I am failing anyway.

Do I feel like I am failing, or do I think that I am failing, or do I think that I feel like I am failing.

Ah fuck it.

From: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Thursday, April 4 at 16:16
Subject: smells of piss and a home to snakes

G–

I remember we used to write about the books we were carrying around with us (and hopefully reading). I thought I ought to start there: I’m reading a memoir by an Irish musician, Sinéad O’Connor. In bed in a rented villa down south. The view outside my window is obstructed by the shell of a hotel, cement-grey with mascara running down its face. Construction began before covid and was abandoned over the lockdown. I escaped here in 2020 when the world was a shut-in. I’m back in 2024 because the north, where I live, is on fire. Literally. Google it. Chiang Mai. Smog.

But Sinéad, that’s what I wanted to write to you about. Are you familiar? Brilliant and mad. She tore up a photo of the pope on the telly when she was 26 to protest child abuse. This was before the Church admitted that such a thing happened. She reminds me of my mother who died at 33 from cancer. Sinéad died last year at 56. I shaved my head for her. In her memoir she writes about the death of her mum. Her mum who starved her and punched her in the gut.

I have not written anything in the years since I last wrote you. I abandoned the writing and it is a hovel where stray dogs take refuge. It smells of piss and a home to snakes… I feel rusty. This might take a while, for the writing to feel like my own again. Be patient with me.

PS– Better three years late than never?

Write back,

B.