Snail Mail and Being a Writer

The last letter I snail mailed was to my former best friend of twelve years. We were becoming estranged and our friendship was dissolving so I wrote him this letter in the beginning of 2012 even though we were living in the same city for the first time since 2001.

By 2012 email had become “cheap”, too easy, dime a dozen, too hard to know if it was written out of sincere caring or convenience. Too hard to know how it would be received. And just plain too much of it. At least a snail mailed letter implied effort, intention, need, something real, of literal substance. Paper and ink.

Well my effort did not work. I received an email from my friend a month later saying he apologizes that he received my letter but hadn’t been able to bring himself to open it.

Okay.

We haven’t reconnected since.

Soon after that I began blogging regularly. I had already been writing daily for at least 12 years, with pen and paper. Add blogging most weeks to my daily writing and even writing text messages began to feel laborious (well, okay, I was late to jump on the smart phone bandwagon and my phone was laborious to text with).

But I also didn’t want to text, or email, or Facebook message my friends. I already spent a good amount of my time writing down words quietly, by myself. In the rest of my time, in my social time, I wanted to hear someone’s voice at the very least, maybe even see a facial expression or touch someone’s skin from time to time.

Sometimes I wonder about this writing life I am living. It’s nothing new, writers have expressed the conundrum of needing solitude, yet the incredible loneliness of it for centuries.

Yet I do wonder about it. Am I tricking myself into thinking this is a connected and important way to live? It feels so necessary, yet more than half the time I feel so alone and don’t even remember why I am doing this. Amnesia occurs and I can feel like I have no purpose in life at all pretty easily.

Yet, if I tell anyone I know, or even anyone I don’t know who has read my writing, that I feel no purpose or wonder what my purpose is, they practically roll their eyes as if I’m the least likely person in the whole world to question my purpose.

And I get that sometimes.

Like today. I received a handwritten letter that made me cry. Maybe because it’s been so long since I’ve seen or spoken to this friend, so long since I’ve gotten a handwritten letter in the mail, so long since I reflected on how writing makes me less lonely overall.

This letter was from someone I was friends with as a child, when I was a teenager and she was a young girl. We went to a family camp on an island in New Hampshire every summer and she was one of my little friends, a handful of years younger than me, at least.

We adored each other for real. I loved who she was and how she looked up to me and couldn’t get enough of her. The feeling was mutual.

As we grew up, we recognized a shared love of writing and poetry. We read each others poems and writings on Facebook and loved them. The feeling was mutual still.

For someone who finds salvation in words, there is nothing like another who finds it there too. There’s nothing that can bridge that gap of solitude and loneliness like someone who hears words the way you do. There’s nothing that can heal my loneliness like knowing that the medicine I make of it can heal someone else’s loneliness.

My wound is not something that can be healed by placing lots of people around me. This is something a handwritten snail mailed letter can start to heal. An intention, a feeling, a need.