The Letter That Arrives Anyway

The Keeper's Journal Entry (text in bold represents a truth or factual event):

Tonight I returned to the Shadowed Path for a lovely, but remarkably uneventful, walk. Strangely, I felt a touch of disappointment. My wanderings had been quite eventful of late, and to return to my cabin without encountering a strange creature, an impossible object, or some new mystery felt unusual. The feeling did not last.

When I opened the door, I found a letter waiting for me upon the table. That, in itself, was strange enough. There is no postal service out here and no neighbour close enough to call unannounced. The letter had not been there when I left, of that much I was certain.

The envelope bore my name. I picked it up and immediately felt something wet brush against my thumb. Looking down, I saw a dark smear where I had disturbed the ink. The writing had only just dried.

A peculiar unease settled over me then, for the penmanship seemed familiar. Not merely familiar in the way one recognises a style seen many times before, but familiar in the way one recognises one's own reflection.

Impossibly, the handwriting was mine.

I turned the envelope over several times, as though doing so might somehow reveal a sensible explanation. None presented itself. I had no recollection of writing the letter. No memory of addressing the envelope. No memory of returning home and placing it upon the table.

And yet I knew those marks. It was my hand.

I wondered whether I had missed the signs and gone out on a night when I should have stayed indoors.

With some reluctance, I opened the letter. Inside was a delicate sprig of pressed flowers with petals of deep violet, yellow and white. No text, no explanation, just the dried flowers.

I held them carefully between my fingers, afraid that the brittle petals might crumble. 

Heartsease. The flower of remembrance.

For a long while I simply stared at the pressed flowers. The choice could not have been accidental. Whoever I had been when I wrote the letter, they had wanted me to remember something. The troubling possibility was that they had known I would forget.

The flowers offered no answers, they merely sat upon the table before me, silent and patient. I placed the Heartsease carefully between the pages of my journal. Then I sat beside the fire for a long while, trying unsuccessfully to remember what I had forgotten.

The Truth In The Text

I did something a little bit different with this one and wrote a letter to my younger self. I won't share it with you, it is enough to say if I could send a letter through time as the story suggests then I would send this to my 8-year old self. This letter was handwritten with a dip pen and ink and tucks away into one of the envelope pockets. 

There is also another truth contained in the text: heartsease is the flower of remembrance. Heartsease is the common name for Viola tricolor or the wild pansy - a bit of a misnomer because it doesn't belong to the pansy family at all, but to the violet family. 

A few years ago now I bought a second hand book from Savers containing the work of the Bronte sisters. As a youth I loved the glorification of trauma - the tortured man painted as a hero that just needed to be loved. By today's standards (including my own) he's an abusive hateful man but that story... oh, how it influenced my young mind. 

Inside that book was a small posy of dried violets, serendipity perhaps?

The Make

I wanted to lean into the letter aspect of this make, so I used to envelopes as the base to create an interactive trifold that opens to reveal the story. The journal text above is what you see when you open it, and the letter I wrote to my younger self is tucked in behind one of the panels with a specimen slide containing the dried heartsease in the other pocket. You are welcome to use the image below if you wish.

I didn't attach the folio to a page in the journal, instead it is inside a clear zipper pocket. I want my kids to be able to take it out and get the tactile experience of opening and exploring through the pages and pockets. This does mean my journal is starting to get a bit bulky so I have had to transfer it to a different A5 binder to accommodate the growing content.