Pen Pals

This piece will be a WIP. I’m not 100% on it but let’s see how we go.

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From: Luke Jackson

To: Hanna Bjerke

Date: 16:13:47, Sunday August 25th, 2024

Subject: Pen pals

Hanna,

Welcome home! I’m not there in person to say that, of course, so this is the next best thing (maybe second best to a handwritten letter but that’s a bit slow and, to be honest, I didn’t want to wait weeks for replies back and forth.) I’ll be the last person to wish you that I reckon but I mean it. You’ll have barely been back long enough to process it — it took me a few weeks at least to realise I wasn’t just on secondment or something back home — but: how’re you finding it? Tell me all about it.

Thanks too for your email address. Maybe I’ll just use this as an excuse to write to you too much and think about it too little but I’ll think about it more than I would a few messages on Instagram. Fire reacts on the weekends and so on, you know.

The Internet tells me it’s 12 degrees there and overcast on a Sunday morning in what should be the tail end of summer, travelling season. Here it’s 23 degrees and the sky is bright blue — I’ve attached a photo! — and it reminds me of your eyes. 

I have work tomorrow. I’d suggest you don’t rush back into the office if you don’t have to. It’s easier to hold off when you have a bit of money saved and you don’t still have a mortgage on a place. I missed it overseas, that’s true, because it was built better and more spacious and with a laundry inside of it not outside, but Brisbane is a quiet place and sleepy. Remember that idea we talked about, where the cold weather made you work harder? All I want to do here is be outside in the sun all day. I’d even work from a shady spot when the heat’s not so bad and the fresh air comes crossing in from the wide, ugly, brown river, but everyone has a smile on their face and the sky is like it is today — blue and broad and open as far as you can see. It helps you look forward to tomorrow not because of anything you have planned in it necessarily but because you know that it will be beautiful.

I hope the jet lag is not too bad and I hope you’re not caught for weeks just in seeing people after people after people. It’s good but it got old for me because so many people were the same as before I left. Do you find that too?

Happy Sunday.

Luke x