postage

today is St. Patrick's Day, and fittingly, I have spent most of it with Flogging Molly in my head. it's their song "If I Ever Leave This World Alive," which I remember hearing in the movie P.S. I Love You when I watched it with my roommate last week. cute film, it was. sad and sweet and random. she gets all these letters from her extremely thoughtful dead Irish husband. how beautiful is that?

I love writing letters. I have always loved writing letters, and I will always love writing letters.

anyone who knew me in high school can testify that I was a note-writing fiend. we'll call it a symptom of my finding school too easy, never needing to take notes, and getting all my homework done before class was even half over. I'd find a blank page in a notebook, write someone's name at the top of it, and start writing them a letter. there has always been something so comfortable about communicating on paper--seeing your thoughts spelled out in ink and ready for someone else to take in--even if there isn't much to be said. sometimes I stuck in little puzzles or drawings to keep the recipient entertained during those horrible Western Civilization lectures.

many, many inside jokes, crazy inspirations, and intense debates grew out of these little letters I tossed around between friends and acquaintances back then. I even got a prom date out of one such exchange of notes. the beginnings of short stories and plays and novels took shape in some of those notes. friend Vera (look, she has a blog, too. and by the way, yes, I do really want her to make me a corset like the one in her most recent post.) and I used to exchange entire blank notebooks, each taking a turn to inscribe long rambling, doodley messages for each other. I still have all those notebooks in a box somewhere.

once upon a time I attempted to write and post one letter each week, every week. Sundays were (and are still) good days for thinking about far-away loved ones and composing some news and a few thoughts to send. the goal lasted a month or so, and then for whatever reason I let myself stop. did I run out of people to write? no, not really. did I run out of stamps? they don't cost so much. it's pretty easy to get more. did I run out of time? well, that's possible. life is full of distractions and stuff. I think maybe I only ran out of people I felt like writing, or people who I thought would appreciate a random letter from me.

yes, letters are slow. they cost at least 44 cents to send these days. and they can seem overwrought and extra-complicated, especially now that we have phone calls and email and text messages and facebook and endless other far more immediate means of communication. but I still love letters, even if I'm writing to a person who lives next door, or a person I talked to on the phone thismorning. and it's not that an email can't be just as thoughtful or just as meaningful. it can, and I'm glad. but a letter in an envelope with a stamp on it is wrapped up in an extra layer of time. there is a sense of leisure to writing a letter, despite the extra effort it takes. someday soon I will get back in the habit. yes, that means I will need to buy more stamps.

and if any of you want a letter--first you'll have to promise you'll write back.