As I am most often guilty of being much bolder in writing than in person, perhaps this is all that would be wise for me to say on the subject, as well as to silently accompany and honor any further suggestions which are therein contained or inscribed. Saying any more would be indiscreet. Occasional indiscretion not being undesirable, especially at the beginning, at the acquaintance stage, when it seems there is something at stake and - for assessment or for perception of potential depth, or because there is some quick glimpse into the darkness.
Anyhow, I would have more rightly been a Victorian lady, handsomely appointed with proper stationery for measured correspondences contained within writing desk drawers, looking out though thick drawn curtains over a properly overgrown lush while nevertheless wispy and daintily-laid garden, suggesting a place for guests of such a one to get lost in the afternoons, to compose silent, though ardent verses tucked away shortly thereafter. One happily resigned to a lanky and prepossessing traveling wife or husband whom I could imagine as one imagines a steamer trunk being loaded and unloaded from ship to port, and for whom I would intermittently, and with suitable melancholy, post letters and politely (utter lack of impatience being the mark of the royal subject, is it not so?) await the inevitable response, months later, just after an alternately sun-drenched or dismally rainy breakfast with dishes moved to the center of the table, nearer to timid buds huddled into rounded glasses. Poised with letter opener worn smooth, without significantly registered emotion, but for a faint and gently withered amusement at the time passing from writer to reader to writer to reader.
This is actually the distressing fact about the rapid or quasi-simultaneous electronic conveyance; there are no coaches or camels or rowboats or greasy canvas mailbags pulled taut at either end, knots and ropes, gales and gusts introducing and sustaining the possibility of natural misfortune and of calamity coming, after the actual distance, coming again or definitively between the separated. After all, what of the peculiarities remain concerning distance, if so predictably and efficiently bridged, so vainly predicated on crossings at such regulated interval? And then what can be the point/sense of vastness at all, if not swirled precariously into reality and into, and inseparably among, the day-to-day. Concerns. Of course one might revert to other means for maintaining and cultivating mystery and intrigue, even though one might glibly reply that it is simply mundane to slip into fantasies of more ridiculously intricate times and locations, particularly suspicious when such fantasies involve the contrived and dissipated, desiccated remnants of Empire. In any case.
Such a melodic English and high tonal phrasings and utterly remote social interactions do make one a bit, frankly, a bit parched and bloodless, whitened on the inside, while foolishly smiling and inserting timed witticisms into the flow of repartee, if only to disprove our purportedly mongrelized lack of such specious and cynical cleverness and of linguistic buoyancy. All of which do ultimately make one long for a bit of sweat and for the sticky, near misses and near hits of one's home, though things are much more politely thwarted here in the remote reaches of the imaginary order - sublimated glances and brushes and winks (oh you of the wink!) are simply not acknowledged, are simply and categorically dismissed.
I mean, what is your story? Such questions that I can ask rather simply from here across this chilling Atlantic. Travel, I maintain, is still travel no matter its speed and its frequency and the droll ways we do try to be dismissive of the disparities it introduces and encourages, or dismisses outright. In me, if you will suffer the admission, it raises and broadens the most mischievous of my entire lifelong cultivated range of mischiefs, both in this place that I find myself and in my infrequent missives launched off to the mainland, so for this and for any unacknowledged gaps or lapses inadvertently exposed, suggested, demanded or revealed even partially I must beg of you your forgiveness, humbly signing myself,