I’ve always found a thrill in concrete modes of correspondence. I don’t exactly remember what the books specifically were, but I do remember that I went through a phase towards the end of my elementary school years where I exclusively read books that consisted exclusively of modes of communication -- e.g., only e-mails, letters, memos, etc. I actually went through a massive e-mail kick; for a couple weeks every other morning I’d send out a massive mailer list to my friends and family with fun fonts and songs and stupid internet jokes. 

 

In hindsight, I’m not going to lie to you, I must have been sort of annoying. I stopped sending those as I stopped getting responses.

 

That urge hasn’t ever really left me, I don’t think. 

 

It started with holiday cards. It was about three or four years ago, at the start of my angsty teenage cycle of being incredibly lonely and also not being sure what to do about it. The cherry on top of the cake was the lingering wave of devastating sentimentality surrounding the holiday season. So, I sent out cards. Everyone I sort of even considered a friend got a card. It was fun, it was joyful, they were sent, and then it was over. I flipped my pen between my fingers. There was nothing else to write.

 

So, the next year, as soon as the Thanksgiving festivities were over, the cards were whipped out once more. After the end of a wave of summer programs, I exchange short-lived letter chains with friends I met outside of my area code. The summer before my senior year, I sent out languid letters to friends of mine, or, boldly, to people I wanted to become closer to, expressing my thankfulness at getting to know them and my wishes for our final year as high schoolers. 

 

The stingiest, most Scorpio-moon-difficult thing about writing letters is the rarity of getting them back.

 

I don’t think the beauty in letter-writing lies in the frequency or intensity of its correspondence, though. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve learned in the years I’ve oozed letters from every pore. It’s the common sense of humanity and peace, as pen goes to paper -- the reminder that things never truly change, even as the world heats and curls against warfare for the umpteenth time. It’s the pure amount of focus on just one individual it requires, for just a couple of minutes. Thinking about exclusively one person, for that long, for the exchange and for the production of words, nurses humility and love for one another like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. 

 

I’ve learned a lot from letter-writing. Some of the most beautiful conversations about femininity and what it means to be a woman, truly, have arisen in a particularly creative sliced-construction paper slip I was sent this past autumn. A surprising reconnection with a childhood best friend, a cousin. The loveliest of wax seals. 

 

Something about letter-writing connects me, somehow, with my own femininity. As a girl who battled years with her internalized misogyny, the delicate power and fragile networking of letter-writing activates some soft womanhood within me. Letter-writing is something so intrinsically woman that’s there’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated entirely to a set of women in early modern Europe, whose unknowing words trailblazed modern recognition of history and managed to change the conventions of European literature in the process.

 

It’s also just fun, if I’m being honest. There’s an elegance to looking down at ink-stained hands, and there’s a despair to looking down at an ink-stained white comforter, and equal glory in slatting out letters to seeing one in the mailbox.  Every stroke of my pen is another piece of my femininity, born and reborn.