A woman sits down at her desk, dips her pen into the inkwell, and traces out a letter. To a friend, to a lover, or somewhere in between, the world may never know. She seals the letter with wax, the blood-red color pooling before being molded by a stamp. what’s left is an imprint of the night sky, ready to send to its recipient.

A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. -Emily Dickenson

While the scene above seems straight out of the 1800s, it’s actually something I do on a regular basis. Whether communicating with people in Massachusetts or Naperville, having a pen pal is inexplicable magic that I treasure. Letters themselves have had the joy sucked out of them; bills, companies hounding after you to buy their product. It’s become a feed-off of the internet. But when I look through the pile and see that decorated envelope addressed to me, it sets my heart aflame. It reignites that need to connect, to maintain, to keep. Letters used to be a way to connect, to talk. Now, they are fading into time, losing themselves to digital alternatives. Texting, email, and phone calls are the letters of our time, conveniently at our fingertip. a few keystrokes and I can talk to someone halfway across the world. so why write a letter? What’s the point when everything is so convenient?

A letter written to me by a friend.

That’s the point. It’s inconvenient. You have to take time out of your day to write a person back, to address the envelope, and to make it pretty(or not). The simple act of inconveniencing yourself shows the other person that you care about them. You went to the trouble of creating this tangible thing. You went to the trouble to tell this person, regardless of what’s written, that you care about them. It doesn’t have to be romantic, it just shows commitment to the relationship that texting and email never can. Who would want a letter, you may ask? Write to your grandmother. I can almost guarantee you’ll get a response; I’m sure she has collections of them written from old friends, stored away in her closet. Write to your friend in college. Everyone is currently in their dorms, packed like sardines. Some connection to the outside world away from their computer would be a welcome reprieve.

“Life is bearable when you have someone to write, and someone who writes you back. Even if it’s just one person.”
― Eunjin Jang

If you don’t have anyone to write a letter to, then don’t write to them. Write to yourself. I myself have written what I deem “rage letters.” I write about my anger, anxiety, and sadness, and decorate the envelope. After that, what do you do? Well that’s up to you. you could save them in your closet(though that didn’t seem to work out too well for Lara Jean in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, or maybe it did). If you want to protect your emotions a bit better, burn them. Holding a letter as it goes up in flames, you feel as if your emotions travel with the smoke, dissipating into thin air. Or tie them up and hide them in your room. hide them under your bed, or tuck it behind a chair. Finding them later in life, and laughing about how absurd you were.

“I have nothing to tell you, save that it is to you that I tell this nothing” – Roland Barthes

So now, if you want to write a letter, you may be confused on where to start. In order to actually get your notes down, you could either type out a letter or handwrite it. Now, I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that you all love handwriting things as much as I do. But I do think handwriting here is better. It’s more personal. it you’re going to the length to write a letter, you might as well go the whole way. Either way, you need to put it into the envelope, and then address it. Addressing a letter isn’t very hard. While it seems difficult to remember, know that the Mail system won’t automatically reject your letter because of a typo. Anyway, here is how to address a letter:

First Line : Name

Second Line: Address

Third Line: City, State + Zip code

That’s it! All you have left is to stick on a stamp, throw it into your mailbox, put up the flag, and wait for a response back. And when you get the response, you feel that pure, unaltered joy your recipient received.

Citations:

Hall, Alena. “9 Reasons Not To Abandon The Art Of The Handwritten Letter.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/benefits-of-writing-letters-and-postcards_n_6425540.

“Therapeutic benefits of writing letters” Therapeutic Benefits of Writing Letters, www.piedmont.org/living-better/therapeutic-benefits-of-writing-letters.