Paris, 24/10/15

And then we talk about the loquela, described by Barthes as "an emphatic form of the lover's discourse", that we see everywhere. They are the silent and circular conversations that stay in our heads. Those voices, our own voice multiplied, torment and exhaust us; it's difficult to make them stop.

And then it occurs to us: a letter. We will write a letter to try and stop one of our loquelas; the one that spins incessantly, the one that doesn't extinguish itself. We buy white envelopes and we find white sheets. We don't want lines: only the end of the paper will limit us.

We sit down at a café, near the post office open on a Saturday afternoon. We choose a table on the terrace. It's not cold: our fingers don't hurt from staying uncovered. We write and we pour out that which has twisted and turned so many times in our insides. We are surprised by the way the words change in their journey to the paper. At times they seem polished, with soft round edges. Sometimes they are sharp, filled with teeth. We run out of paper and we have to say the last words, or tear a sheet from a notebook to extend the exorcism. We finish, but we could have kept on going. We open, we fill, we close the envelope.

We tremble, though not as much as we would have imagined. We walk towards the post office and the wait for the traffic light to change seems endless.

Everything's ready. We take turns to throw each envelope inside the yellow mailbox, and we can almost hear their whispers when they land on top of bills, postcards, birthday cards.

Away go the letters. Away they will fly and roll and also (maybe) slide. They carry the words we wrote, the ones that will never reach their destinies. Because we purposely noted the addressees but kept the addresses quiet. Because we sent the letters, but we never said where they should arrive. Because what we did was useless and liberating: we took the words out of our heads and we tossed them unto the paper, into the air, into the belly of the mail.