#32: 17 August 1984: I'm just not that into you.

Find that loveliness.

2024:
Special edition extra post coming up.
Niche interest.
Or maybe just what you’ve been waiting for.

The posts here from the diary which I wrote nearly every day in 1984 so far have in some ways been rather guarded.
That’s about to change.
Writing to your future self with half an eye on the fact that it might one day be read is one thing. Playfulness and irony cover a lot of things. There are lots of things you don’t write.
Writing to tell your teen girlfriend you are splitting up is another ball game.   
That’s a very personal letter you write (on 17 August 1984) then put a stamp on and pop in the post box.
And then you never see or think about it again.
You go on holiday, and maybe move on to the next girl. (Please refer to the picture in my last post of me blissfully receiving a peck on the cheek.)
No one else is ever gonna read that letter, right?

Unless…

Unless… by some good fortune and by being half-decent human beings you’ve stayed friends with that ex-girlfriend.

Unless… for some reason (you’ll have to ask her) she’s the kind of person who keeps all the old letters and stuff.

Unless… 40 years later, on learning about my diary, she goes to dig out her own diary of the time and also that very letter. Weirder, she tries to find the letter but can’t; and it’s me, while my family and I are having a little holiday break at her place, who picks it out of a huge box of old papers! Imagine that.

Unless… she’s the kind of person who not only gives you permission to put it out there but says… “go on, give the mega letter its time in the sun”, with more than a little “I dare you!”

Obviously, looking back, what one should do when ending a relationship is say, “sorry I’m just not that into you” (I believe that is the correct modern terminology) and leave it at that.

What you probably shouldn’t do is write six pages of excuses, starting with your own teen hang-ups (“is it right to own money… it must be reality that the universe exists…”), trying to cover your arse with a literary analysis that is effectively an English Lit essay on Mill On The Floss, being indirect (get to the point man, and don’t go off packing bags for your French holiday in the middle of it), and worrying that after all that she will think badly of you and not want to still be friends. And then sign off with “lots of love”. Don’t do those things, right?

Or maybe, when you are a teenager (or adult for that matter) there shouldn’t be so many ‘shoulds’.

And, regarding expressing it all through what you are reading in a book, hang on, isn’t that just exactly the whole point of literature, to make us see ourselves, find analogies, consider our emotions and actions, and understand our relationships? Isn’t that exactly what one should be doing? Or if not writing it, at least thinking it. Isn’t that what any Taylor Swift song does? Why not then the much deeper (female writer) George Eliot?

But thinking those things is one thing. One shouldn’t necessarily be publishing that letter 40 years later, should one?
I’ve been struggling with this.
This letter makes me look... immature, inexperienced, naive, selfish? Too cerebral?
At least that’s what I’m thinking.

[Hang on, this is an aside, did I just find a neat way to include a link to my favourite Italian song Giudizi Universali by Samuele Bersani which starts with those very words.
Troppo cerebrale per capire che si può star bene senza complicare il pane…
Too cerebral to understand that you can be fine without complicating the bread…
I love this song.]

But of course, I shouldn’t be second-guessing what you will think.
Most probably, you don’t really give a monkey’s about a random person’s weird teenage letter.

As I’m going to post it as images below rather than transcribe it, you might not even read it. You might rather prefer to read this Wikipedia entry on the book The Mill On The Floss. It’s much more educational and at least you’ll find out who Maggie Tulliver, Phillip and Stephen are.

On the other hand, this diary project…. is a project.
For me it is a kind of artistic thing that has a bit of a life of its own, has gone off in some surprising directions.  
Sometimes challenges me.
It is actually by now a proper fairly lengthy book!
You’d buy this for £14.99 in Waterstones. (Thank you to my paid subscribers btw. And if you want to upgrade your subscription to paid if you are enjoying this, that would be so cool.)

Anyhow, the letter has showed up.
It feels as if it belongs in this ‘narrative’.
It feels like it wants to join in the fun.
I’m going to let it.

So here goes… Let’s go back to 17 August 1984. If you look at my diary entry for 17 August 1984 it mentions the phone call with Sophie that interrupted me even as I was writing this very letter to tell her we were splitting up. But otherwise that diary entry doesn’t say anything at all about my apparent anguish. Hmm, strange. Two days later I head off to France. Maybe I post the letter as I leave so that I don’t have to be around when it drops. Maybe this in 1984 was in fact not quite so different, though more lengthy, from the modern dumping by SMS.

Obviously this post comes with a dedication and big and genuine thank you to the very same Sophie, who has been encouraging me in the publishing of this diary from the beginning, is reading this, and has been a good friend to me, my wife and all my family over all these years.

“Find that loveliness.”

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17. VIII. 1984.
Dear Sophie….

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