Letters from my sister

Paris is the city I chose to undertake my postgraduate studies in and which I now call home. It was for some time the epicentre of the pandemic in France. Macron’s brand of lockdown enforced strict and resolute confinement. Returning to the UK to rejoin my family was ill-advised and the Eurostar prices exorbitant. Besides, solidarity with my colleagues and friends, most of whom are also expatriates, seemed paramount. 

So I settled in for an indeterminate period of self-isolation, where, aside from brief interactions with shop assistants, I spoke only to my flatmates and, on rare occasions, slipped notes under the neighbours door to inform them their loud music choices were in bad taste. Leaving my apartment for anything other than groceries or exercise would have incurred fines enforced by ubiquitous French police officers on horseback, and even necessary excursions had to be justified with a signed and time-stamped attestation. 

I had friends in the countryside able to hike mountains, swim in lakes and host barbecues, while I sat at my desk facing the same shady courtyard, robbed of sunlight for the entirety of the unseasonably warm Parisian spring. I would stare out, hoping the concierge might choose today to clean the patio or take the bins out so I could briefly escape the dull diurnal torpor of my field of vision.

However, it was not a wholly bleak time. I spent many a boozy evening with my flatmates, staying up with corner-shop-Heineken until sunrise, playing pictionary, and initiating Greek fraternity chants.

Yet, what brought me the most respite from the lockdown tedium was the surprising resumption of bi-weekly letters from my little sister, filled with zany quotes, doodles, and the optimism of an un-jaded, quirksome soul. We often exchanged letters while I was at university in Scotland, but had fallen out of the habit. As if emerging from sororal empathy beyond any explicit direction, my sister understood that lockdown made the emblematic presence of loved ones essential and so resumed her whimsical epistolary updates once more. 

My younger sister, Evie, is on the eccentric side. Her letters describe the overlooked quotidian; the way people are dressed on the bus, the sprouting of the cactus seeds I bought her for her birthday, the inconvenience of long supermarket queues. She offers me cryptic advice like “beware of any red balloons someone may give you!”, and litters her letters with inside jokes: “are you lost little boy?”, “here we go into the wide blue yonder”; nonsensical to anyone but me. On my birthday I received a voucher exchangeable for one free hug. The small print reads “Admittance One. To claim one must present ticket upon entry”. 

While I spent my days writing essays about silent French cinema, trying to hold the plank for longer than a minute, and rewarding myself for successfully completing any task without succumbing to the prepossessing world of youtube, I was all the while wondering when might arrive my next instalment of Evie-esque anecdotes from England, my next little trinket caught in the envelope, my next warm delivery of ink smudges and exclamation marks. 

I once opened the envelope to find a card with a blue Volkswagen camper van on the front and “ZOZO HOLA” written inside in multicoloured felt-tip, and nothing else besides. All her letters come with personalised stickers sealing the envelope; her name and address embossed with a bouquet of flowers.  She studied floristry and details her various floral projects: a cascading waterfall for the church altar made from sea lavender, gypsophila, leather leaf and ming fern, the Google Chrome logo made out of carnations, and, of course, many a “rather dashing” but solemn funeral wreath. Some letters are written on a typewriter, others with quill and ink: which, she affirms, “feels quite different to a normal pen”. But, no matter her choice of script, she invariably reminds me to “PTO” (Please Turn Over)  at the end of the first page.

Like unwrapping foil to uncover goodies, or pulling a cracker and unfolding the enclosed joke to read aloud, opening Evie’s letters is the excitement of discovering something tangible and personal, intended only for you. A token all the more sacred in this bizarre epoch of the pandemic. And even after the lockdown ended, the letters kept arriving.