What Ira wrote

I feel like I’m looking into someone’s photo album, a collection of old party pictures, the moment before recognising my own face among the smiling teenagers dressed in peach-striped tops, lime-coloured suspenders, and oversized t-shirts.

Am I really meant to know this Ira? This friend who writes me a friendly and personal, but mysterious postcard from her travels. Someone I can’t remember who’s taken the trouble finding a card, buying it (probably overpriced, from a run-down petrol station under the tall trees, where no English, or hardly a word of anything, is spoken. A marzipan-fingered woman in a flowery, yellow dress, takes her money and places it into a metal box. She then fills two plastic cups with sour, almost condensed coffee, and turns back to the tv set in the back of the room), thinking of a way to write a few sentences that are both related to our relationship (she has told me about the rocks) and her current situation (with Andrew).

It has crossed my mind that someone else might have written this card — someone whom I know, or someone I don’t know. I look up, and study the block of flats across the road, scanning it for perverse stalkers who watch me in my underwear every morning, moving with a rosy teacup from the kitchen to the computer. But then, would they write of Russian rocks, with no hint of my own habits, a slight perfume of this city? I don’t really see a hint of anything familiar.