vi

Dear Ellie,

Yesterday, buying a sandwich, the cashier called me 'Darling' and instead of inciting anger it felt like someone had seen me, momentarily, and offered a tender gesture in a lonely sea.

Moonbeams,
P
x

v

Dear Louise,

There is a girl at school with a gorgeous sprawling derriere. But I find it a very insolent bottom. It twitches from hip to hip and jiggles with a rhythm all its own. When it walks away from me, the sight of it bobbing along, singing its naughty song, makes me itch to teach it some manners. The fact that the girl it is attached to underlines vast sections of library books, in class, only serves to make me more irascible.

Fondly,
Paeony
x

iv

Dear Ellie,

When I take a banana to school and it comes time to eat it, I find myself quite selfconscious. The acute awareness of being selfconscious causes devolvement. Something about the banana makes me treat it tenderly, with a careful hand; it must be peeled and eaten a certain way, in a certain order. The fact that there is nowhere to eat a banana unobserved is most unhelpful.

You are in many of my thoughts.
Much love,
Paeony
X

iii

Dear Louise,

As the rosy ball of the sun was breaching the far sea horizon, it lit the architecture of the sleeping frangipani. It illumined the skeleton onto the white curved wall, transposing an organic dream on the starkness.

'I am here' it said.

I was most grateful.

Always,
P.