Letter number 4: Reminders

Dear Alexandra,

This will be a short letter, it was prompted because you texted me about something. An actor from one of our favourite programmes passed away at a relatively young age. You asked if I’d heard about it, I replied that I had and it was really sad, you agreed. I resisted asking how you were. So far.

Yesterday I went for a walk with J, it was lovely — he’s a good person to spend time with. When we got to the coffee place where more people were it seemed like every dog walker had a French Bulldog. You love them, whenever I saw them around I’d get surreptitious pictures of them to send you, I had to suppress the urge to do it this time. So it amused me that a day later you did reach out with something similar.

We used to talk about rescuing a Frenchie and calling it Lafayette. It made me happysad to see so many of them.

It was nice (is that the right word?) that you reached out to me to share sadness at a favourite actor passing away. Part of me is aching to ask how you are, to dissect things further, I don’t think it’s the right thing to do so I’m going to try to resist — but equally looking at our messages thread with the last reply being from you looks incongruous. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last months with it always being my messages stacking up with no response, and it made me feel awful.

I don’t want you to feel like that. But I also don’t know what to say. I feel glad that you texted, it shows you’re okay — I’m trying so hard not to snoop on your Twitter, when you were last online on Messenger, it’s not healthy and I know it isn’t, but it’s nice to know that you thought of me and felt compelled to reach out, even if it’s for something fairly banal like a celebrity we don’t actually know passing away.

I love you, Bert