Dearest Rachel –
This letter may be shorter than most of the ones I’ve written to you lately (although you never know; I might be able to stretch it out into a thousand words all the same). I hope that’s okay with you.
The thing is, there’s not much to tell you about today that you haven’t already heard before or that (as far as I would expect) you would find of any interest. Since the month – indeed, the fiscal year – has just turned over (and no, I didn’t stay up until midnight on the 31st in order to yell “Happy Fiscal New Year!” and startle the boys on the other side of the house with noisy festivities at such an uncharacteristic hour), I’ve actually got plenty to start taking care of this week. But that’s just stuff pertaining to my profession, and you might recall that I rarely bothered to talk about that even when you were around, under the assumption that it would be too ‘in the weeds’ to be of interest to you, or anyone else, for that matter. Heck, sometimes it doesn’t exactly interest me, and I’m the one doing it, if only for the dopamine hit of getting it put together.
So obviously, if I wouldn’t talk at length about it back in the day, when communication was a simple matter of opening my mouth and letting the words just cascade out of it, how much less would I be wanting to write about it now, when it takes so much more time to type and edit and work my thoughts into a series of cohesive paragraphs? Especially when I have some ‘real’ work to get done that I need to focus on? So I hope you’ll forgive me if I keep this brief.
I always hate approaching this letter to you as if it were an obligation, but I’ve made it so much a habit that I don’t want to break the routine for something relatively trivial like thing. If a day goes by without you hearing from me, it ought to be for something big and out of my control, like getting laid up in the hospital, preferably unconscious, where I literally can’t keep up this means of contact, and would have to rely on you coming to me in my comatose state. And while I have some difficulty pulling myself out of bed this morning, it really wasn’t anything more than the usual Monday morning doldrums everybody faces at the end of a weekend, even one as uneventful as the past one has been for me, so it wouldn’t count.
I know I’ve already been at this longer that any streak of yours on Candy Crush or Gardens of Time, or any of those other games you used to play (or at least check in on) almost religiously, so I imagine I’d be entitled to take a break, especially when there’s ‘more important’ stuff to deal with. And yet… that’s probably overselling my docket, by a long chalk. Yes, there are things I need to do, but they aren’t urgently needing to be completed today. I just received a tranche of documents greenlighting me to work on the monthly (and annual) statements over the weekend, so I can get started, but it’s not as if I have some imminent deadline. In fact, the meeting to go over the statements I usually prepare (along with all manner of other church business) has been moved back to almost the end of the month, to cover the fact that summer scheduling conflicts are a thing for all concerned (and that there won’t be a meeting in July). There’s no rush to what I’m just now able to do; it’s just that now, I’m able to do it when I haven’t been for the last four days (not as if I’d concern myself with it over the weekend, anyway).
So yeah, my tasks aren’t exactly a reasonable reason to give you short shrift. Although I will say that they give me little in the way of conversational fodder, so there’s that. I hope it doesn’t bother you too much; at least there was that extra letter yesterday that might make up for today’s limited output.
Still, you never know what a day will bring. So with that in mind, color, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 