Surprise Packages

Surprise Packages
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007

One of my favourite parts of every day is opening my letterbox. Whether it’s the actual letterbox in my driveway, or a virtual inbox attached to one of my many email accounts (at last count I had 8), I always feel excited to see that there is something waiting for me.

Junk mail, spam, bills, and unsolicited appeals for cash are not nearly as exciting as genuine efforts at communication, exchanges of emotions and ideas, or the sharing of news about people in my life, but I’m a mail junkie and am generally pleased to get almost anything at all.

I’ve had some intense and long-running exchanges during my life, and can characterise various stages according to whom I was communicating with at the time.

Grandpa, my father’s father, was a wonderful letter writer. He lived in Texas and we lived in Australia. As just one of his nine grandchildren, I got letters from him several times every year. Even during my troubled times, estranged from most of my immediate family members, I could count on an elevated mood when an airmail envelope appeared in my letterbox, addressed to me in spidery blue ink. He wrote to me about his garden, his friends and family, my Grandma, and the everyday things that were part of his world. I replied in kind.

Moving around so much, as we did, I tried to keep in contact with friends in each place after we left. When you’re a child and a teenager, it can seem as though everything is so mundane and ordinary – what is there to write about? My friends didn’t understand how precious every sliver of information became to me, abruptly yanked to a new place devoid of personal connections. For my part, I didn’t understand why they would be interested in what I had to say about those new places! Unfortunately, these friendships didn’t develop into pen-pal relationships.

My year in Germany (January 1985 – January 1986) had a profound effect on my letter-writing activities. I wrote every week to my family in Adelaide, and although I was not homesick, I received the regular letters from my mother, father and siblings with great glee. I also kept a diary, which I haven’t done during any other period in my life. So much happened in Adelaide and Europe during that year, it’s hard to credit that it was just twelve short months. One of these days, I shall delve back into those letters and pick out the juicy bits. Who knows – maybe there’s something there for public consumption? It was an amazing year.

During my tumultuous years of courtship and marriage, (1986-1993) the man who wooed me wrote me many poems, notes and letters. I loved this, and avidly replied. We lived in a sharehouse for much of the time we were together, and the members of our household communicated, argued, complained, requested and celebrated via a series of Housebooks. I remember looking through them a year or so after leaving my marriage. I was utterly appalled by the constant petty conflicts they revealed. How hard can it be, to share space and cooperate with shopping, cooking and chores!

When email started, I had no idea of the impact it would have on possibilities for communication, or how my life would be touched. I had no inkling of the ease with which I would be soon able to use a computer to find people who had disappeared from my life, and invite them back in, or just to catch up on what people are doing with their lifetimes. I’m truly hooked!

When she moved up to the Rainbow Triangle to study in 1997, my sister became my main confidante and I was hers. Our emails were prolific and detailed. Through them, we became much closer than we had been when we lived in physical proximity to one another. We continued our communications for more than a year, while she established a new network and grew less dependent on me, stuck back home in Adelaide. I was sad for myself when this period ended, but happy that she was happier.

Emails got me in a lot of trouble back then. Still not quite aware of the public nature of electronic communications, I was blacklisted, punished and virtually shunned when I expressed my outrage about certain events in the activist circles I was still part of at that time. With the benefit of hindsight, I know my outrage was partly sparked by the intense emotional turmoil I was in, as I embarked on my healing journeys, but the vicious retaliation by women I had considered my allies and friends has marked me indelibly. However, these hard experiences have not taught me discretion as they might have, had I chosen the path of repression, over expression.

I fell in love in 1995 when I went back to uni. When I finally came out to my psychiatrist about it all, she thought I was transferring my need for human connection onto a woman who was distant enough to be safely out of reach. This was how she explained away the longing I felt for my classmate. It took me three more years before I made a choice to set these fantasies aside. I used to put anonymous notes in my classmate’s pigeonhole at uni. I was convinced she knew who I was, and never ceased to hope she would meet me as I had proposed, or simply talk to me, and let me know she was interested in me as well. Of course this never happened. It was indeed my fertile imagination, breeding myriad vibrant and lovely possibilities for me in my otherwise grey world of sustained emotional pain and distress. Had I had this woman’s email address, I might have been bold enough to embark on a mediated journey of exploration with her. Or my fantasy might have been curtailed much sooner than it was.

I was never convinced by the effectiveness of letter writing as a strategy for change, but over the years, I have written many letters to newspapers, organisations and politicians. Some of these attempts at communication have engendered responses that are gratifying in themselves, even when the issues I had raised in my letters are not directly responded to or resolved. It’s an interesting thought – that in itself being able to voice my opinions and needs leads directly to a healing response. Getting something – anything back, can be immensely satisfying!

There have been acquaintances with whom I have struck up a pattern of written correspondence during stressful times in their lives. One young woman took an internship in Geneva for a year. She had never been overseas before, and seemed to take comfort in our letter exchanges. This was pleasant, but after she returned to Australia, she found her social needs were better met by people physically present in her life. Our friendship was curtailed.

For someone like me, who has often felt intruded on when people get too close or assume too much about my boundaries, written communication is an excellent tool for mediating necessary relationships. It has allowed me to get close enough to colleagues that we can share deeply, without my feeling invaded by their interest in me. Emails are also great tools for venting, because when used with caution, they enable one to circumvent the protocols and hierarchies that govern the bureaucracies in which I have worked.

When used with skill and due care, emails can also enable the reinvention of one’s public (and perhaps private) self.

So when I fell in love for a second time, my girlfriend and I embarked upon a passionate exchange of emails. Of course this time, our relationship was real. It was far more satisfying than the two-dimensional fantasy love I had had with my university classmate. For me, the pleasure of expressing my love through the written word greatly illuminated and elevated our relationship. When she went overseas for a year, I adored being able to keep in daily contact with her, via emails. It was almost as good as when she was physically present, with some obvious exceptions. I missed being able to go places with her, and experience things together. The depth of our sharing was limited mainly by the fact that I had never been where she was, and could only imagine the experiences she related to me in her emails and letters.

And it’s our regular communications I miss most about that relationship.

Last week I ordered something on line for the very first time. It was supposed to arrive within 4 to 6 days, but hasn’t got here yet (probably due to ANZAC Day). When I saw the delivery van pull up in my driveway yesterday, I felt the familiar stirrings of excitement in my belly. I wanted to get to the front door before my son, because what I’ve ordered is his birthday present.

“Hullo!” I called through the screen door.

“Hi. I’ve got a parcel for ….” He struggled with my name.

“Yes, that’s me.” I opened the door, and he handed me the package. “Thank you very much!”

Noticing the Australian postage sticker, I turned it over. This wasn’t the parcel I had been expecting. Then my heart gave a little leap of excitement as I realised it was from my ex-girlfriend. So I was right – she had been thinking of me, during these school holidays. How nice! I think of her every day, but I haven’t been brave enough to try and resume contact with her, since my last attempt was misconstrued and my wing feathers were badly singed.

I opened the package and drew out its contents: a book I had lent her (it belongs to my daughter), and the Christmas present I gave her last December just after we broke up. I felt slightly ill. Her message was transparent. She’s still smarting from my rejection, blaming me for our incompatibility, furious at being left alone, and unable to let go and move on.

I had promised my children we would go op shopping, so off we went. But why was I feeling so hurt inside? I couldn’t even find the tears I wanted to release. It was in the third op shop that the answer reached me – perhaps there was a note in the book. I hadn’t leafed through the pages, but would check when I got home.

There was no note. Just an ancient post-it she had stuck in the front of the book. I recognised it immediately. It was a message I wrote to her as I helped her pack up her house before she left for overseas. An intimate, passionate expression of love with every intention of reassuring her how much she meant to me, even as she embarked on an overseas trip that many others construed as her abandonment of our deepening relationship.

This didn’t make me feel any less ill. It still feels like an underhanded passive aggressive reproach aimed with every intention of communicating to me how badly she believes I have treated her. Horrified by my suggestion that our relationship was not perfect, and humiliated that I wasn’t happy with every aspect of how we related to one another, she never did beg me to reconsider and try again. Perhaps pride got in the way of her considering this possibility. Perhaps she still feels it is a betrayal to admit she knows how much I loved her. Perhaps she simply has nothing else to say to me. This could be her way of telling me she is ready to let go. I hope so.