When I left California for Rhode Island, I said a permanent goodbye to a world where the people I held dear were amassed in one place. My relationships to them began to be rooted more in memory than in the present. Meanwhile, my love found new footholds with a sparkling web of college friends, whom I learned to crave with the same daily regularity that, before, I had craved my hometown clan with. A break in a semester or between school years now swaps my two worlds—college friends, sprinkled across the country, even the globe, dissipate into a world temporarily beyond access, and, for a spell, the people at home become my world again.
Between whichever cast of people distance wedges itself, we try to bridge the gulf. We send sporadic texts, we call, and it all feels like a flattened facsimile of the relationships we know to be so much more.
But we forget that correspondence can be more—it can be a thrill and a treasure.
In the last days of August, I wrote a longhand letter for the very first time. Of course, I’d handwritten personal messages before. I scrawled a dramatic, tear-stained goodbye to my college-bound sister six years ago. I’ve written sentimental birthday cards, pressed carefully creased notes of affection and well-wishes into the hands of camp friends and graduating classmates, left inscriptions in books I’ve gifted, and so forth. But the intention behind them was not to elicit a response, nor probe into a new corner of the relationship, nor reveal new truths—only to offer up old affections in new prose, like a period at the end of a long, trailing sentence.
This letter was not that. I left home in California to spend the last week of summer with relatives in the lush foliage of the northeast. There, the full weight of my distance from those I care for in my home state settled on my chest and made my every move heavy. It hurt to miss people so deeply, and, even more, to anticipate the stunted online echoes they would soon morph into.
Made meditative by wooded seclusion and backed by the chatter of wind-rustled leaves and wood thrushes’ soprano exchanges, I bent over a blank sheet of paper and wrote my first real letter. I wrote driven by the necessity of converting care, nostalgia, and gratitude into something tangible and permanent—for myself, yes, but more urgently and more essentially, for its recipient. I wrote a letter with a cramping, ink-smudged hand, because no other medium could accommodate the honesty, directness, and openness that felt so vital to convey.
The process started haltingly. My prose came out clunky and overwrought, and I worried about inconsequentialities like the consistency of my handwriting and the quantity of scribbled-out, misspelled words. The page seemed fit to burst with superfluous adverbs and filler sentences. The trash can swallowed my first, second, third attempts.
But then I realized that I was writing neither an essay, nor the epilogue to a friendship consummated by life changes like a graduation or a big move. I wasn’t composing a writing sample to prove my prosaic worth to some rigid professor. I was doing nothing more—and nothing less—than having a conversation with someone dear. The only difference between normal conversation and this was that writing delivered my thoughts through a slower, more refined channel than the usual hurried spillage of spoken dialogue—a chance to cut out the “ums” and replace them with words that nailed a feeling or idea on the head.
The words flowed. I wrote about moments from the summer, spent with the letter’s recipient, that I’d been thinking about with particular fondness. I relayed anecdotes from the time since I’d landed on the East Coast. My musings and sentiments gathered momentum and rolled straight out onto the page.
When I slipped the sealed envelope into the mailbox, I felt a similar kind of catharsis to that of when I close my freshly inscribed journal and lower my head onto the pillow each night. All those pent-up kernels of thoughts had found their way into words. And now, those words would find their way into the hands of the person for whom they’d urged their way into coherence.
Of course, receiving a letter in return delivered a fresh tide of gratification and gratitude. How special it was to see that handwriting! Those loops and smudges are, I’m convinced, the next most alive, physical form of access to another person after touchable, visible, and audible presence. They’re a distillation of personality into a precious visual pattern: no letter is the same as the next, but each one’s variability is familiar—like the cadence of a voice. And it made me smile so wide to hear that voice in my head—no less full of honesty and personality than if we were talking side-by-side over the hum of a car engine, or in the quiet of a bookstore backroom, or in whatever other setting our adventures have landed us—but inflected, here, by the same attention to linguistic accuracy I’d poured into my own letter.
In that attention lies a wonderful truth about letter-writing: the letter itself is a form of care. Whether or not the writing contains explicit professions of care, its existence is evidence enough: effort and intent and purpose live in each scratch on the page.
I view electronic communication modes as inherently generic. I’ve never felt inclined to print out a text message, even if it says something as explicit as “I love you.” Any sentimentality is circumscribed by pixelated, formatted impersonality. I could receive two “I love you” texts years apart and in entirely unrelated contexts, but seen together, they’d look and read exactly the same.
But a letter, I’ll save in a heartbeat. Its preciousness lies in the minute choices: the positioning of a word on the page, or the smushed revision of an added word over a carrot—proof of continued consideration. And in the physicality—the blot of ink where a hand smudged a word before it dried, the crease where a thumb and forefinger pinched the paper into a neat fold. The evolution of the script from print to quasi-cursive where the writer had relaxed into flowing dialogue—the same way that, as comfort seeps into face-to-face conversation, we shed stiffness and stop fidgeting and grow loose, at ease. A handwritten “I love you” note, even if undated and unsigned, is unreplicable. A precious instant of the scribe’s life is preserved in all those leaning letters.
I’m revealing nothing new. I’ll surprise nobody by saying that letter-writing is a rich, age-old tradition. But I think it’s a valuable—essential—reminder, particularly to our generation so saturated with screens, that such personal, treasurable communication is possible. It’s as available to us as any of our other modes. I don’t argue staunchly against the value of texting or sending voice notes or even posting on your Instagram story. Those modes of communication are so ubiquitous that it would be ridiculous to recommend replacing them with my new favored anachronism. But their ephemerality diminishes their strength, no matter how carefully crafted they may be. A text gets buried under the next messages within days, even hours. That emoji I tack onto the end of my “See you soon!” is a feeble attempt at distinguishing my message from the sea of its potential duplicates.
The letter from which I brushed pollen deposited by the breeze, where I scratched out a word in exchange for one whose musicality I thought the recipient would enjoy more, into which I poured a long stream of effort and honesty…That letter is a more legitimate version of me than I’ve ever put into a text or even a call. And I know the same is true of the letter I was so lucky to receive.
Letter-writing is a slow mode, and a quiet one, too. We trade the exhilarating pace of spoken dialogue for a pensive kind of care—the head rush of anger for an exhalation of forgiveness, the comfort of physical presence for the warm, smoldering embers of nostalgia.
Our relationships can grow in that empty space between us. And holding a letter, the feel of paper dented by a pen’s excitement, the little heft of it folded inside its envelope, we remember that the space between us really isn’t empty at all.
