The Trouble With Letters

I check my mail every day.

I live in a dorm, so my "mailbox" is about the height and width of a standard envelope. It is also on the highest row. To check it, I must stand on tiptoe and squint into the rectangle of gloom.

Most of the time it's empty, and I can see through to the dim little room where the mail is distributed. The mail I do receive tends to fall into one of three categories: university junk, ads from local apartments, and letters from home.

Let's get something straight. I don't do homesickness. Never have -- not as a little girl, not as a freshman, and certainly not now. Even so, those letters can turn my day around like nothing else. I open them right there in the lobby and read them on my way to the elevator.

Nine of every ten letters I receive are from Brooke, the world's greatest penpal (and friend.) We never had much cause to write one another until I moved to Athens last year. She has written faithfully since then. I have also written, but not so faithfully. Let's take a look at the tally for fall semester.

Letters Received Since August

• ~13 from Brooke
• 3 from sketchy honors societies
• 2 from Kyrie
• 2 from the V.A.

Letters Sent Since August

• 0 to Brooke
• 0 to the honors societies
• 0 to Kyrie
• 0 to the V.A.
• 1 to a boy

So yeah, my record's pretty stellar.

Since August, I haven't mailed a single letter. I have penned one, which turned out to be a total waste of stationary. The aforementioned boy -- though he's older than I am, "boy" is still appropriate -- did not write me before or after, and has since taken painstaking care to show me what a poor judge of character I am. This, of course, is all beside the point, which is that letters are dangerous things.

Letters are personal. Think about how close you get to that paper while you're writing on it. You touch it, you breathe on it, you mumble to it while you're getting your words straight. You form each letter deliberately. If you smudge something or leave an inky fingerprint, it's there on the page. If you cross a word out, it isn't gone; the process is visible and permanent. Your imperfect first choice is as plain as the more appropriate/eloquent word you choose to replace it.

Now you lick the envelope shut. You address it. You buy the stamp, and you lick that too. If kissing is intimate in part because of the exchanged saliva, then this part of the process really seals the deal (pardon the expression.) You lose something of yourself -- saliva and skin cells and ink from your pen -- when you drop a letter in the mailbox. They're gone after that. Sorry, ma'am. There are no take backs in letter-writing or in life.

Finally you find yourself in the thorniest part of the process: waiting. It's not such a big deal if an email or text goes unanswered -- emails can be caught in filters, buried under other messages, or deleted accidentally and texts can be forgotten -- but letters... they're something different. They come from a simpler time when every question deserved an answer and if you weren't brave or decent enough to say what you wanted to someone's face, you at least had to concede enough of yourself to fill a page.

Is there a moral to this story? Maybe. If so, I'd bet it has something to do with a variant of the Golden Rule. You know: treat others as you'd like to be treated, sisters before misters, that sort of thing. Consider me chastened, whatever the case.

Feeling sentimental on a cold autumn afternoon? Rent a chick flick, but don't try to live one. It sucks to regret something you've said, but writing something you shouldn't have -- and knowing the proof is still out there, chilling in someone else's sock drawer -- is far worse.