Crummy Letters

Take 24 sheets of high quality paper.  Tri-fold them as for sliding into an envelope for mailing.  Open them.  Stack them up.

That's the pile to my left.  Just beyond that is the pile of torn-open envelopes.  No neatly sliced open bearers of documents, these, but ripped asunder with impatience fueled by the guilt-riddled knowledge that they should have been opened, viewed, signed and sent back years ago.

No, I'm not being hyperbolic.  Years.

24 letters spanning from 2012 to the end of 2018.  I suspect there are others lurking in odd corners of Casa de Crazy, waiting to haunt me.

They come quarterly-ish, issued by a lawyer I've maybe met twice...three times?  I don't know.  He's a nice fellow and I'm likely the bane of his existence, or at least the bane of his filing system.  There, in drawers neatly labelled with names or numbers or whatever he has going on in those solid, sturdy steel receptacles, is a file that isn't as thick as it should be, letters sporadically signed and returned when I find them, when the clouds part, when I remember that I really should be bothering with this, that it's a responsibility I should (and do, really, I do) take seriously, and more than take seriously, I should act seriously about it.

I'll spare you what they're about, these letters, except to say they're really a good thing, nothing criminal or nefarious, a lovely piece of legal footwork that is worthy of admiration and the scant seconds it would take me to sign and return them if only I paid attention.

Depression isn't just being tired.  It isn't just eating what one shouldn't.  It isn't just forgetting or neglecting medication or crying one's self to sleep, or staring into the nothing for hours on end.  It isn't just anger and restlessness and feelings of being of little or no worth.  It isn't just a messy house, messy hair, rumpled clothing, fighting to breathe, hiding in darkened rooms, wanting to scream, wanting oblivion.

It's not dusting.  It's letting the dishes pile up and cat boxes go uncleaned.  It's piles of laundry unwashed or unfolded, un-put-away.  It's un-mopped floors.

And it's letters unsigned for years on end, piling up grey and forlorn until the clouds break and, in a fit of clarity, they're signed and mailed en masse to an unsuspecting lawyer who will likely stare in disbelief as he shuffles through the incomplete chronology of neglect and whisper incantations to himself in a reflexive response to what could possibly be determined as a miracle...or a curse...before passing them on to a secretary or assistant or whatever they call people who patiently take stacks of papers and order them into folders to be kept until perdition or maybe slightly less than forever. 

I'd say I'll do better, now that I'm somewhat caught up again, but while that wouldn't be a lie because I mean to, really I do, it wouldn't exactly be accurate.  Intention isn't action, and it's action that speaks, isn't it?

If there is a tremor in the Force, if you see a brilliance on the horizon and hear joyful trumpets shattering the air with a clarion call, if a wave of warm benevolence washes over you sometime near the end of next week, you will know that somewhere in Redneck Central a terribly nice, wickedly smart, beleaguered lawyer just received the peculiar gift of 24 signed letters the receipt of which, I hope, he hasn't been holding his breathe for but perhaps was holding out hope.