It’s been many months since Karen and I blogged about our letters, but offline, our correspondence is alive and in the post. We’ve now been writing to each other for over a year, and these letters, with their free-flow of thoughts, pictures, poems, birds and colourful envelopes have become an essential part of my writing process and my life.

It’s been a year of new places and a whole assortment of post boxes…

I started the year in Geneva, with its famous yellow postboxes

Then back to London, where our letters become more local

... And finally to Singapore, where some colourful postboxes can be found, as well as plain silver ones.

On a trip to Melaka in Malaysia, I also discovered these beauties:

Letterbox at no. 89

Chinese letterbox

Living so far from home, I’ve been surprised to find that my best news from the UK comes by post. Skype, email and facebook would be hard to live without, but they rarely include as much of another person as an eight-page letter. When I’m writing my letters, I feel as if I’m spending some time with Karen, sharing a little piece of my life with her.

Karen and I have noticed that when we were blogging about our letter writing and how it fed into our writing process, our correspondence had a stronger visual element. We sent each other more pictures, collected photographs for the blog of things we were writing about and developed ideas for poems through images as well as words. We’ve decided to try bringing our correspondence back online, to see what happens.

I’ll sign off with some large Indian civets, who often accompany my letters…

I am not so fragile to handle with care,
though you may be holding back, scared of hurting me.
No, don’t be afraid.
I am just one half of a cymbal waiting to be struck
to scare off the ghosts of hunger and shyness.

Come. Let’s listen to the gongs and drums.
They are auspicious,
they are friends outside the window;
downstairs the banquet is in progress
beneath the block.
My half of brass is simple and unique
and yet, you may not see
what I have to offer:

luck in love
wealth with enterprise
happiness through children
reunion with the better halves of those who have passed.

By striking me aloud
you could start a long queue of moans,
or a short fight with the screeching banshees
if we disagree.
At least, we would be talking, relating, making love, or pretending.

And there would not be this room of silence.

Do I sound complicated?
In the right hands
I could be the petite modern friend,
sleek as an ipod between your thumb and fingers.
And yet there is no ‘you’.
‘You’ are a Seventh Month ghost.
‘You’ are a pig’s head sitting on the set banquet
waiting to be let out of hell.
‘You’ are the dinner table
and ‘you’ are the glass of wine,
an offering to the love that is not here.

You are abstract, invisible,
a brass voice wave-band broadcasting somewhere
on a mountain lost in mist and time.
You travel between the strikes of the gong
leading me back from history, although
I am just listening to the revelers downstairs
as I pace about in my cuckoo land.

Go out! It’s Saturday night.
Go out, girl! Out!
Time to brave the pedestrian crossings
between the malls after a restaurant meal.
Just don’t step on the prayer offerings of mandarins and joss sticks,
as the paper money burns and flutters in the wind.
That would be bad luck,
that would scare him off.

Trouble is, I have no brass friend.
‘You’ – do not exist,
ghost of my cymbal self.

I am waiting for the thunder clap
to gate-crash in on me.
I ache to be woken up
in the middle of the night,
to be man-handled, with care,
and given due attention
like a silk princess of the court
at midnight with tea
and a tray of chilled raspberries;
to be torn exquisitely like tissue,
to be lit like a joss stick on an altar
before the god of desires,
to be told that I am beautiful,
and that I exist in a world more than incense
and not mere flicker on a computer screen.