I do not know what was in them.
That is the thing that has been keeping me awake since the September, and it is not grief and it is not even regret exactly.
It is that there are two letters from a twenty-year-old woman to a twenty-year-old man, and she was me, and I cannot tell you one sentence of either.
I remember writing one of them. At a table, in a flat at Cantrell, with somebody’s radio through a wall.
And I remember that it took a long time and that I was careful with it.
And that is the whole of what I have.
And Alun Reith had both of them in a drawer for six years and then put them on a fire, and then kept his own nine for fifty-one.
And the version of me that is in those two letters — the one who was careful, at twenty, at a table — is the only version of this that neither of us has got.
