Well, my oldest friend. The one that knew me when I rode a bicycle for entertainment and lived down the street and carpooled to everything wrote me a letter to help me answer that very question, so I'm gonna share it with you: yes. It is a better, more meaningful way to really keep in touch with someone. (duh)
First of all, when I opened my mailbox that afternoon and saw an envelope with familiar handwriting written on it it was like finding a treasure. I plucked it from the pile of trash that usually ends up there and opened it as fast as I could.
I read it in her voice like they do in movies and for the first time in what felt like a really long time I felt connected to her. No distractions. I was totally focused in on her one sided conversation and I couldn't wait to start penning down mine.
Six pages later and a hand cramp, I felt like I was actually saying something. I put a lot of myself in that letter. I really thought about how I wanted to respond unlike a normal conversation where you just kind of blurt out the first thing that comes to mind to keep it alive because I knew she would really hear me, you know? If not for the fact that she can re-read it to actually absorb what I felt the need to write in six pages, but because the damn thing was six pages! I don't even remember what I said.
That brings me to the other reason I really loved it. I can't take those words back. They belong to her now. I said them and breathed life into them and they are now living a life en route to New Orleans I have no control over. I was fully aware of this when I sealed the envelope. I better be able to live with these words being out there and, the thing is, I can and I feel a little bit of freedom in that.
Which reminds me, a couple of months ago, a friend showed me a huge stack of letters he had tucked away in his room at his parents' house. There they were in my living room, all the letters girls had ever written him. Covered in bubble letters in colorful envelopes words girls felt they had to say to a boy they probably barely knew and here he was probably 10-15 years later sharing them with me. He doesn't really know these people anymore and probably never will. He did find the need to keep their words and was excited to rediscover them and, I would guess, have them join the stack of letters he may have living at his apartment now.
I mourned the fact that I felt the need to discard all of the ones that had been given to me. Professing things that were so sweet and powerful and loving because I felt like they were lies now. I had to rid myself of them. But, I remember them. I can still see some of them clearly. I wish they were in a forgotten shoebox buried under my bed, but I guess they very much are buried in my mind.
When I write something no matter if it's with my thumbs on a tiny little iPhone (like now) or all of my fingertips on a keyboard or with my entire hand around a pen, it means something. I'm taking something that exists only in my head and breathing life into it and making it something real in the universe.
So, you better fucking mean it because it may just live in a shoebox under someone's bed as a tangible time capsule of who you were in that very moment with words you felt so needed to be said that you wrote them, licked them for security and gave them to a stranger to give them to someone who is about to really see you.
So, what's your address?
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