I have boxes of letters.
These boxes are filled with colorful postcards, poetry and short-story crammed packages, pictures, lipstick stained pages, scented love notes, and letters so long they required creative origami to fit within envelopes.
Between 1992 and 1997, I spent a great deal of my misbegotten youth flirting on-line with pretty much any halfway interesting female I could find. Few proved interesting enough to talk with beyond the first few months, but their letters are testaments to my unrelenting mission to explore the female mind.
And by ‘explore the female mind’, I mean ‘engage in sexual conquest’.
This was before everyone had a folder on their desktop marked ‘personal pictures’ filled with an intimate reservoir of carefully selected photos ready to be attached to your most recent Craigslist correspondence.
No, back then it had to be done the old-fashioned way. Via snail mail.
Seduction occurred in the following progression:
1. On-line chat.
2. Phone conversation.
3. Letter with picture.
4. Real life meeting.
More often than not, I never actually got to step four; I was too shy or too busy to really push beyond step three. But I did reach step three a lot.
In truth, I did love receiving letters. There is something about reading handwritten words that has a solidity and elegance. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t partly motivated by my hope for a picture when I requested they write me.
And so I have stacks of letters. Most are filled with details of day-to-day lives that read like diary entries without the truly juicy parts. Some were more intimate, expressing love in the way only aspiring teenager writers can. And a few, just a few, wrote stories, erotic musings that filled my late adolescent fantasies.
I had countless amount of greeting cards, stories, poems and letters that I kept in various portfolios. I lost most of them due to a car fire, but I still remember the significance of them all. They represented my growth, my imagination, my curiosities, my understandings..my life.
Each one of them, received or never sent, was just a backup physical reminder of what I’ve been molded into. Wonderful thing, the pathway of life.
Happy New Year!
i still ache for the written word…handwriting…something tangible.
Dark romance will always assert this stylish revenge on technology. I have a huge affection for real letters. On one side of my desk sits my computer, on the other side is my hand carved letter rack, papers, ink and sealing wax. Correspondence from friends spills over the top urging me to steal an evening sometime soon in which to respond. Like elsie, I know the ache for something tangible.
We’ve gotten spoiled by the internet. Hang on to those letters. Hand written words are precious!
Yes.. indeed I have a ton of shoe boxes filled with letters ~ from boys and men and beaux and all sorts of the in between men..( sigh none from women.)
I love rereading the old letters from my grandparents.. they would send two or three a day to each other! And all were delivered by train and then horse. .. Amazing .