He still writes me love letters. I find this endlessly astonishing.
For the past week, I’ve been putting holiday cards together. And somewhere, amid all that licking and addressing and stamping, I realized: I never write letters anymore. Hell, I hardly send any kind of personal mail whatsoever the ye olde snail mail way. And there’s something distinctly sad about that.
But even sadder, that no one writes love letters anymore. At least as near as I can tell, hardly anyone does.
We tweet, Facebook, email, IM and text our sweet nothings and sweet somethings alike now for the most part. Our oaths of love are ephemeral, electronic bursts – textual representations of 0s and 1s as much as they are of our feelings. At best, intangible. At worst, fleeting to the point of self-negation. Ghosts of love, spectres of emotion.
When I hold these letters in my hand I feel the weight of them. I can see the movement of his body in the scrawl of each letter, how his hand swept over the page to shape each word. I can imagine the pulse of his blood moving through the fingertips that held the authoring instrument.
I can’t believe I found you. That you’re real. You amaze me every single day.
There is something very flesh and blood in taking pen to paper, something that gets lost in translation to a digital medium – something visceral and physical that makes the words seem somehow more real, more true. More permanent.
We should write more love letters. We should put pen to paper more. Why don’t we?
