Letter Writing

So a good friend of mine and I had a conversation, that went a little like this:

‘Do you fancy writing letters to each other rather than using technology?’

‘Yeah that sounds like a good idea, shall I start? I like getting post!’

‘Ok, go on then, I look forward to getting some post.’

Insert tumble weed as the biggest sense of writers block overcame me. And I did not write to my friend, or in fact speak to her for months, in any sense. Lockdown came and she messaged me and asked if she was ever going to receive her letter.

I had to admit to her that I had drawn a blank and I was struggling to bring pen to paper. So she said that she would start and so I became the one waiting for the anticipated letter.

It arrived! I cannot explain to you the sense of excitement and joy I got from hearing the postman slip something through the letterbox and me coming to realise that it was my letter. Pale cream envelope with flowers on, quite fat, eek! Exciting.

Opened it up and out came 6 pages of writing, all for me. Not shared with millions on snapchat, not ‘liked’ by a myriad of people I don’t know on Facebook, it wasn’t a picture of a cute envelope on Instagram. It was just for me.

My friend told me about how life is going for her at the moment, anecdotes of times spent laughing, crying and trying not to strangle the kids. The ups and downs of life. And it was wonderful. I read it twice before I knew that I had to reply.

No.

I needed to reply.

My friend had helpfully asked some questions throughout her letter which gave me the prompt that I needed and I penned 6 pages in return. It was fascinating to think that only one person was going to read what I was writing and part of me thought about taking a picture of the pages before I sent them off on their travels, I paused as I wondered what would I do with those pictures?

I reminded myself that these pages were not for me to keep.

They were for me to send!