Sixteen Hundred Days

Dearest Rachel –

It’s been fifty-three months as of today, honey. In that time, I’ve written you well over two thousand letters – actually, over twenty-two hundred or so, in fact – and once this is sent, I’ll have dropped you a line every day for sixteen hundred days straight. Which by the way, means that you’ve now been gone for sixteen hundred and twelve days.

Don’t worry; I’m not obsessive about your absence to the point that I’m actually keeping track of the days, like tick marks on the prison cell wall that is my world. As it so happens, I don’t have to, as the journaling site (and app) I’ve using to create these letters does it all for me (“Congratulations! You’re on an XXX-day streak on Letters to Rachel!”). Granted, the extra twelve days I kind of just have to know to begin with, but with that difference sorted, yes, this is something I don’t have to think about. It’s just there right in front of me every time I complete and send out another letter.

To a certain extent, I’m not sure how and why this came up this time around; it’s not as if sixteen hundred is a particularly significant milestone. Fifteen hundred or, later on, two thousand would be more so, wouldn’t you agree? I suspect it has something to do with the confluence of both the number and the date; how often are these milestones likely to fall on a monthly anniversary of your passing?

I would also mention that this probably doubles up on any string you boasted of (and tried desperately to maintain; to the point of manipulating the clock on your iPod or computer) with the games you used to play, whether Garden of Time or Candy Crush. And unlike you and those games, it’s not even like I get the dopamine hit of extra graphics or assets. All there is is this notification that I’ve added another day to the string.

So what spurs me on to continue with this? I’m not even this consistent with my communications with “Lee,” for instance (although, to be fair, she’s just about as likely to initiate a connection as you are; while I can accept that you won’t reach out, her silence is just one more reason to doubt whether this will actually work out), or even my daily Bible reading (although I’ve been doing reasonably well over the past couple of months, and I can’t remember the last time I went more than two days without reading. It helps to be online on a daily basis; just the fact that I have tabs for the various passages I ‘need’ to go through is usually encouragement enough to ensure that I keep it up about as well as communicating with you). Without any external encouragement to do so, you might wonder, why do I press myself forward with this?

Well, maybe you wouldn’t be wondering about this, yourself; aside from the rewards of the games themselves, you just liked playing then.  Those little benefits were enough to keep your string alive, so that you could get more; that’s how these games work.

Meanwhile this whole thing was set up as a form of self-therapy, as I worked through dealing with life after you. I think I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but I sort of assumed that it might wind up documenting my slowly disintegrating mental state, for all I knew and expected.  That hasn’t happened, thankfully, but I’ve found it a useful means to monitor my own memories, rather than, letting them slip through my fingers like sand through an hour glass.  Which makes me regret not having done this that much sooner; how much more I would be able to remember of you and our time together if I’d been doing this back then.  Then again, when would I have had the time?

It could also be argued that, in your absence, I’ve been doing a lot of things differently in my life, and they need to be recorded.  If nothing else, they may be ways that other people can use to cope with their own problems that mirror mine.  And, let’s face it, some of the observations made while traveling had to be made in that moment; they wouldn’t have made as much sense in distant retrospect.

Of course, those are reasons to continue writing to you, but they don’t necessarily suggest that I need to do so every single day. Then again, I can’t recall a day when we didn’t speak with each other; most of this, of course was because we were in proximity to each other – I didn’t travel much as part of my job, for one thing.  But even when we were apart, we managed to keep in touch; there really wasn’t a day when we weren’t in contact.  And as such, it feels incumbent upon me to continue that even now, however ridiculous that might seem to some people.

But speaking of other people, there is this sort of conceit in me that gets me thinking that after so long, people expect to hear from me on a daily basis, and as long as I can keep it up, I might as well oblige them.  If nothing else, there’s constantly something happening to or around me to comment about, as well as the more than occasional odd thought that I can’t seem to let go unexpressed. I’m not about to say that everything that goes through my mind has a whiff of genius to it, but who’s to say what might have meaning for somebody else or not?

And so I continue, for sixteen hundred days in a row thus far.  These explanations may seem flimsy, but they’re all I have.  I kind of hope you’ve been enjoying them as I mail them out to you, especially if you have been keeping an eye on me like I always ask.  And, of course, I might as well ask you to keep wishing me luck, as I’ll continue to need that.