Friday, March 12, 2010

imagination

Can I tell you a story about a very young and impressionable  girl with a
 very vivid imagination?
One day she received a letter in the mail and
 with great excitement opened it to find a roneode message
(most of you would be too young to remember these 
they were blue on slimy paper and they smelt.
They were the original photocopy) 

The message on this sheet offered wondrous events
 as long as she sent it on to 10 other friends...but 
if she didn't then great bad luck would befall her.
 Example were given of people dying or falling ill.

She was a good girl
and had always been keen to please others
and always did as she was told
 (boring really)
 but this worried her.
 She did not want to send such a message to her friends 
but if she didn't what would happen.

Her Mother being a sensible soul
 said throw it out and immediately screwed it up and threw it in the bin.
As luck would have it,
 there was a family incident that night
 that involved a missing brother and police searching for him, parents in a panic.
.
Horrified
 the young girl raced to the bin,
 unscrewed the sheet of paper and dragged out the phone book.
 Not being able to roneo the sheet,
 she painstakingly copied it 10 times then selected 10 addresses
 out of the phone book
 and whilst her parents were talking to the police (at 4a.m.)
 she ran all the way to the top of the street and posted those ten letters.

By the time she got back her brother had turned up at home
 (it was a car and boy thing totally innocent and harmless)

Inside her mind she knew it was not the letter...or was it.

Several day passed and her feelings of guilt 
at sending this disaster to strangers
 would not go away and she could  not eat or sleep. 
Her parents became worried.

Eventually she became quite ill,
 as she imagined awful things happening to these stranger 
(I did say she was young and had a vivid imagination!)

So again she got out the phone book 
and went through every page to find the ink dots she had left beside the chosen names.
 Again she painstakingly hand wrote ten letters 
of apology for doing this terrible thing to them. 
She did not sign her name. 
She again walked up to the letterbox at the end of the street 
and posted each one of those 10 letters.

That night she ate and slept for the first time in six days.

Over the years she received more letters in a similar vein.
 She threw them in the bin.
 She would not sleep for several days. 
But then, when nothing dreadful happened, she would carry on.

Even today when she reads the words
send on to 3 friends, 4 women you admire, eight work colleagues.....
she feels nauseated and her skin prickles 
but she has never, never, never sent another such letter or email
on to another living soul.
That is my story for tonight

 Goodnight

5 comments:

  1. i like this post a great deal.
    i was just talking about this at work the other.
    i hate those things!!!

    i have never returned on or passed it on to anyone.
    perhaps that would explain my current situation.
    hahahah :)

    xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting...have to admit that I was tempted to do those silly letters when I was young and impressionable (and think I DID on a couple of occasions too!) but now when I get the emails I just press DELETE!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am with you on this one. I never send those on. I would not do that to my friends.I thought those went out in Jr,High. Thank goodness for the delete button, Makes you wonder if there is a special place in cyber space that these all go,hehe. I had to laugh at your comment on my Just Pretty post. I think we must think alike, remember the word identification,you did a post and I was thinking of doing one. At least we must have the same sense of humor. This is one of the things I love about blogging, we get to meet kindred spirits, Thankyou for being such a faithful reader of my blog, I really enjoy seeing your comments, they always put a smile on my face, Have a great weekend,Kathysue

    ReplyDelete
  4. Your 5 words were so honest... I loved them, thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh this is a brilliant post... I get so angry when people (who are seemingly intelligent most of the time) send those horrid and quite frankly disturbingly threatening emails and texts to me! I can so relate to your awful guilt feeling as a young girl, I remember that yucky feeling oh so well, just for different situations:)

    ReplyDelete

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