Vanilla

Draft

Dear Leroy,

There is something odd about the nature of unsent letters, e-mails, texts, and parcels that seem to possess the incredible, inherent ability of being so beautifully broken. I've always thought nothing of the ethical systems beyond utilitarianism, often regarded as the pinnacle of decision-making in every corporate, private world that our minds can hold. It never once crossed my mind how consequences or anything other than physical manifestations of properly produced results could matter as much; how terribly wrong have I been.

Just yesterday, I realized that the parcels I have been sending to the address you'd provided me have been returned to the doorstep of my previously rented apartment—which I no longer occupy, now that I am a second-year student and have a room of my own in Cinnamon lodge—according to the nice landlady. I'm not sure if you'd ever met her before you left.

The feeling, the emotion I felt after realizing you'd never received the things I thought you had was something beyond my capability of describing, let alone terming it, exactly. It was a strange, odd feeling of... of... the closest word I can think of at the moment is an almost, which, itself, doesn't quite make any sense.

Regardless of it being grammatically erroneous, using almost as a noun, as though it was a phenomena meant to be recorded down in diaries and planned every step of the way, well. To me, it sounded quite ridiculous. That was this afternoon.

Now, as I am writing this letter I most definitely will not be sending (I don't quite know why I am writing it, either. Now you see what I mean by beginning to understand the mattering of the non-physical returns or results, of practicality, per se), I am finding it increasingly sensible and perhaps even logical to be conceiving the idea of an almost as a proper, legitimate phenomena.

I am constantly thinking of the things we did not get to do, or have, in some way or another, planned for some near future we were, prior to our separation, fairly sure of. Things like the beach, or that New Year's picnic, or our first trip to a museum. Things like that. Things we never really got to do, together. Things we almost did.

The timeliness of the letters and parcels I sent prior to this are, well... they are now irrelevant. I texted you this afternoon about the parcels, that you mentioned, had not arrived, asking yet again for an address and you told me that your father had had you move to another apartment near West End. Admittedly, I was slightly ticked off by this. Quite frankly, fuming by the end of our conversation that lasted less than fifteen minutes.

That it lasted for that amount of time was, obviously, not your fault. And that you had to move, yet again, a month into your recent apartment, is not your fault either. In fact, I hadn't a single clue how or why the most unsettling disappointment about the situation we were experiencing and an utter inability to do anything about it!

Either way, you never did receive that handy leather-bound organizer I'd gotten for you as a gift of practicality (since you did mention having a rather packed schedule) and it was only three days ago that you told me someone else had apparently gotten you one, your neighbor, yes? And so the gift turned out perfectly irrelevant. I mean, it would have arrived two weeks earlier but, well, it missed you narrowly and was hence returned. For the lack of a better word, the gift was, for all intents and purposes, an almost.

Vanilla

2/9/2021