Thursday, May 03, 2007

Dear.....

My parents were having a big clean up the other week and brought over some of my crap that was still there. Amongst it all was two boxes of letter I had kept over the years. Mainly from my high school days as no-one writes letters anymore really. I have just spent ages rereading most of them and throwing them out. There were letters from people I cannot remember, best friends I no longer keep in touch with and old boyfriends. It was weird going through them all - obviously as a teenager I only had one thing on my mind -boys. One guy who was just friend went to live in Malaysia for a while he only had girls on his mind and listed and ranked 8 that he was currently in love with at the time!! During those years I was mad about cricket - couldn't care about it now. Back then it was the players really I was interested in. Anyway I must have found all these pen pals through some cricketing magazine as there were letters from guys going on about cricket. I wonder what Grant on the Gold Coast, David in Melbourne and Michael in Alice Springs are doing - I wonder if our paths ever crossed at some other point. There was another friend who moved to Melbourne and must have written the equivalent of a large novel to me in letters - they now seem so boring and trivial! There were loads of scrawled letters and notes from a boyfriend I had for a few years when I left school- he was incredibly jealous and I found the letters very disturbing and threw them away. In fact I threw them all away except letters from my Grandfather that I feel are a part of family history and letters from my dearest and oldest friend who has kept the letters I had sent her. We laugh that one day when we are really old we will sit down and collate them and turn it into a book - wouldn't that be nice!!

....with Love Shelly

4 comments:

Alice said...

I think I wrote you one or two (thousand) while you were overseas. Where are they?????

I hope they've gone into 'letter heaven' too, as I'm sure there was nothing of any great importance.

Thanks for keeping Dad's (Grandpa's) letters. Can I read them one day?

LBA said...

I had the same thing, and I was like 'why am I keeping these ?'

Binned.

Really, I think the affirmation of boys writing to me made me feel loved, or some-such. Insecurities.

Goodbye !

Jellyhead said...

Ah, letters from the past! I smiled at the thought of you exchanging letters with cricket-mad boys from around Australia!!

My tatty old letters (from my two friends at high school) are cringe-worthy but also funny and sweet. I can't bear to throw them away, as they are like diary entries of all our trials and tribulations.

Marcel said...

"obviously as a teenager I only had one thing on my mind -boys"

that is interesting to hear as I (husband) was told another story