Remem­ber that show on Sh.owtime “Red Shoe Diaries”? It starred David Du.chovny pre-“X-Files” and was pretty risqué. Now, I’m not going to be writ­ing any­thing quite like what that show is about. Really, the only rea­son I brought it up was because I thought it would be quite a lame ref­er­ence to the title of this post.

Okay, yeah. Mak­ing no sense here. But let me explain first of all by show­ing you this picture.

Yes, it’s a pic­ture of my left thumb as I hold it up to the pic­ture I posted in one of my recent entries. And why, may you ask, am I doing some­thing as silly as that? Well, it’s because that same day that I wrote and posted that entry, I got an email from none other than “Liv­ing Jour­nal” Cousin (herein known as LJC). Talk about major co-​​inky-​​dink!

LJC’s email told me that she (along with her fiancé and fiancé’s brother & girl­friend) would be com­ing for some shop­ping on Sat­ur­day and was won­der­ing if we could at least get together and catch up for a bit. So I quickly responded that I would love to spend some time together in which ever way we could. Of course, I told her that I was just think­ing about her. And then, in my typ­i­cal “blog-​​whore” fash­ion (you know, where you try to “pimp your blog” out to other peo­ple … :-P ), referred her to that lat­est post.

By the time LJC called this past Sat­ur­day, it was late after­noon and they were just pulling into the area. And because the main pur­pose for this trip was to go shop­ping, we fig­ured we’d be able to max­i­mize our time together by shop­ping and catch­ing up. So, we met up at the area mall and shopped. Well, they did anyway.

Me? Well, as you can prob­a­bly sur­mise by this pic­ture … I tried on some nail pol­ish at one of the stores. And silly me … thought that this par­tic­u­lar store might have some nail pol­ish remover handy to quickly take off the color so I didn’t have to go around with one sin­gle red thumb. Yeah … like I said … silly me.

Yep, these are ALL of LJC’s let­ters to me

So that solves the rid­dle of the “Red Thumb” part of this blog title. What, say you, about the “Diary” part?

As I stated briefly in the pre­vi­ously men­tioned post … LJC was some­one that I wrote to about every­thing dur­ing the most tumul­tuous times of my ado­les­cent /​ teen life. So much that our let­ters would get to be 20 to 30 pages long at times. (I’m not kid­ding you … I swear!) She was … lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively … my real life diary (hence the name “Liv­ing Jour­nal” Cousin). I can hon­estly say that my high school years and the ear­lier part of my col­lege years had been writ­ten greatly in detail. As was hers.

The best part of hav­ing this kind of method of jour­nal­ing was that I wasn’t just writ­ing what I felt in a note­book or diary of some sorts … I was actu­ally writ­ing to a real live per­son. A per­son … my cousin … who I trusted (and still do) with my inner­most feel­ings. And some­one, who’s insight and opin­ions about my thoughts and actions, I deeply respected. So by send­ing and receiv­ing each one of our let­ters … well, it’s much like get­ting feed­back or com­ments on any of the blog entries I write. Except rather than it be out there in cyber­space … it’s signed, sealed, and deliv­ered by the good old postal sys­tem. And bet­ter still, it’s given with that uncon­di­tional love and trust that’s very rare to find.

Look­ing back now, I think that I placed such strong empha­sis on my rela­tion­ship with my cousin (and sub­se­quently her two younger sis­ters) because, grow­ing up, I never had that sis­terly bond with any­one else. Being with these three girls would be (and still is) the clos­est that I would ever come to hav­ing a sis­ter. And in some respect, I won­der if this is the rea­son why I’m not as close or com­fort­able around other women today. Mean­ing that I’ve been wit­ness to the bond­ing expe­ri­ence that most women with sis­ters have with each other and their sub­se­quent rela­tion­ships with other women. But that’s it. I’ve never been as close to any other females in my life as I am with my cousins. And even now, the three of them have a rela­tion­ship with each other that I can hon­estly say that I envy.

But get­ting back to the letters …

The run­ning joke dur­ing the height of our letter-​​writing years was that we would even­tu­ally give each other our let­ters back once we got mar­ried. Then we could do with it what we wanted … either read them or burn them … espe­cially because there may have been some really bad things writ­ten in those let­ters that we wouldn’t want any­one … not even our future hus­bands … to read.

My So-​​Called Life

I com­pletely for­got about our promise until the day after my wed­ding when Hubby & I (in typ­i­cal Fil­ipino tra­di­tion) were open­ing our wed­ding gifts among many of our out-​​of-​​town fam­ily & friends. There, in the absolute last box we opened were three books. Yup … all my let­ters, neatly photo-​​copied (col­ored copies, nonethe­less … imag­ine the price of doing that in 1996) and binded chrono­log­i­cally into three vol­umes. I can clearly remem­ber look­ing up at LJC (as well as her two sis­ters) with such amaze­ment as tears ran down my face. I couldn’t believe what I was look­ing at … and I couldn’t believe that she’d remem­bered. The four of us stood hug­ging each other tightly and cry­ing like babies as my cousin told me that she had to make copies because she just couldn’t part with the orig­i­nal letters.

So now … with LJC’s wed­ding lit­er­ally around the cor­ner … I’ve gotta start get­ting my act together. It looks as if I’ll be spend­ing a lot of time in front of my printer/​scanner or the local office sup­ply place mak­ing copies of LJC’s let­ters. Because just like her … I can’t bear to part with the orig­i­nals. But at least now … we’ll both have a set of all our let­ters and all of our responses.

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