Love is a written word
Sometime in the last wisps of 2011, I asked someone I've been seeing to write me a letter for my birthday. He didn't. By simple deduction, you can guess that we are not together anymore. =P
#truestory
I cannot remember when was the first time that I got engrossed with love letters or just the art of writing letters itself. When I was in 3rd grade, I wrote my grade school friends (Ming, Gelene, Peng among many others) during vacation and we all wrote each other back.I've kept all those letters until now and it's a hoot reading them every now and then.
In high school, as it was a norm in Catholic schools, we went to retreats and recollections and we all recollection letters which I took very seriously, writing long, long-handed letters to friends when they went away.
When I reached college, the use of email has been more prolific and text messages was the currency of (late) teenage love. I no longer received letters from suitors, and rather it became electronic professions of love and romantic e-cards that betrayed emotions. Confessions of truth are devoid of that stroke, that dip, the loss of ink, that erasure, all of which are factors you can see when reading an old fashioned letter, written in carefully chosen paper. Equally, when I return correspondence, I go the distance of getting to the perfect pen, the kind of paper {from Kate's Paperie to some really old papers I have just because that's what I feel like writing on}.
I guess that was why most of my literary favorites are mostly epistolary novels. Griffin and Sabine's postcard romance kept me on the edge of my seat for a long, long time. The same way, I was mesmerized with reading Love Letters from Great Men as well as the Griffin and Sabine of the 90s, Chat by Nan McCarthy and of the 2000s, Love Virtually by Dan Glattauer.
It is one of the reasons, too, why I read Letters of Note every now and then --- I believe distance and the power of the pen ignites the motions of the heart.
From one of my favorite books ever, Griffin and Sabine
To this day, I carry a letter in my bag everyday. It's one of the three most recent letters given to me, the third being given to me this year, the first two were from two years ago. I like opening it on random days when the world doesn't make sense sometimes and you just kind of want to go back to a place where you know where to go back to. It's a reminder of what I stand for in someone's life and that I, in all of my crazy, flawed, imperfect, serial fickleness, that I mattered {very much so} to someone at one point in time.
Letters have always changed my life --- and believably so, I've changed someone else's life through that, too. I hope that when you have something to express today, tomorrow or sometime in the future, that you write someone a letter, too. It's almost always a surefire way to make that truly huge difference.
Go write someone a letter today,
T.
xx
For stationery needs, one of my go to places is Papillo Fine Stationers. Check their Facebook page . They customize notepads, too!