It was another icy cold night in New York when Gerard had received the letter.
He had been shut away in his studio for three days and there was a pile of mail waiting for him when he finally made it back to his apartment.
At first he had stepped over the pile in favour of running to his thermostat and turning it on high. He didn’t care about the impending giant heating bill, right then he just wanted to be warm. He was sure there would be snow by the end of the week, he could no longer brave having his heating on anything other than constant.
The next stop was the kitchen. Pile of mail still being ignored. The coffee machine was plugged in and brought to life, sugar was added to his favourite mug and then he began to work on getting out of his many layers of clothing.
Hat, scarf, two pairs of gloves, coat and jumper were all tossed into the hall closet along with his steel capped boots and Gerard finally felt a little less like the abominable snow man. Though he kept one jumper on still, his body shivering as he waited for the heating to kick in.
Only then, as the coffee machine hummed comfortingly in the kitchen, did Gerard pick up the mail and carry it to the kitchen counter.
Leaning against the side Gerard sighed as he tossed pizza menus and other junk mail to the steadily building ‘to-be-recycled’ pile beside the fridge; he was looking for his comic book subscription but to his disappointment the next instalment hadn’t yet arrived. There was however, right at the bottom of the pile, a small white envelope with his name and address written on it by hand.
The only mail Gerard was ever happy to receive were his comics and the odd letter from his grandma. This was clearly not Helena’s handwriting though and immediately Gerard was gripped with curiosity as he wondered what person had taken the time out to write him a good old fashioned letter.
The moment was not to be taken lightly. Gerard had no real friends in the city, his family rarely came to visit and in turn he rarely visited them. Not that he didn’t miss them incredibly, he was just busy. Those special times he would receive a letter from his grandma he would happily curl up on his battered old couch and read it whilst drinking his coffee; this letter was to be no different. Though the writer was unknown, and perhaps the news inside would be ominous, Gerard wanted to take his time in opening it.
Gerard supposed he was an old fashioned kind of guy, or maybe he was just easily pleased; but knowing that someone – in this modern age of emailing and phone calls – had taken the time to actually sit down and write him a letter with pen and paper made his heart warm. His mind whirled over the possibilities of who it could be from and what it could say, but automatically he just jumped to negative conclusions and so he tried to stop thinking about it as he stirred milk into his coffee.
Once he had moved into the living room and was sat on the couch, blanket draped over his shoulders and the reading lamp beside him switched on, he finally opened up the precious little envelope in his hands.
Inside was a piece of paper, neatly folded so that it would slot inside. Gerard drew it out slowly, unfolding it with one hand whilst the other held his coffee mug, his eyes immediately drawn to the neat, slanted italics written on the paper.
Gerard,
I was going to call you and speak to you, but I decided perhaps this would be a better way of getting back in touch. I dropped by your old home to see you, and Donna let me know that you’re living in the city now. We talked for a good couple of hours, and she told me all about how you’re always busy and don’t seem to have much of a social life (so hard to believe that’s true, when you were always such a social butterfly!) so that got me nervous calling you might be an unwelcome encroachment on your privacy, so I figured at least with a letter if you don’t want to hear from me you can toss this out and I can just pretend it got lost in the mail or something.
