Send me a handwritten note, please.
It matters not how you wrote, but just that you did. Write out each looping letter with your own coarse and fumbling fingers. Let the words bend into each other. Let the t’s cross each other out and the i’s be missing their dots. Let the language be so incomprehensible and incoherent and incomplete. Let it be so ugly, but at least, let it be yours.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter what you wrote but why. That you even wrote, that you wrote to let me know something. So now, I’m thinking of how you were thinking of me, and now, I’m thinking of you, fondly.
Always, it will never matter when you wrote but for when you wrote. You can send me a letter you signed a year ago, a decade ago, a lifetime ago. But in it, you talk of our memories and of our future. In it, you talk of a timeless friendship. In it, is a letter that maybe means even more to have come now than back when it was first meant for.
So, send me a handwritten note, please, because the typed characters of your email or text don’t quite say what you would normally say or with the voice you normally talk with or sometimes you don’t even say anything at all. And it all sounds so foreign.
Even as I write this on computer and not paper, you don’t hear my words in the same voice I write my loopy y’s and sometimes backward s’s. You don’t see the mid-sentence change in handwriting when I randomly get a burst of focus that is so distinctly mine. You don’t see the way my sentences crowd at the end of my letter or the way they curl around the edge of the paper when I run out of space but not of stories to tell you. You don’t see how I sent you the note, if I mailed it with a few drawings, tucked it in your book that you lent me, or handed it to you, personally.
Sure, you can still see my words. But, there’s much more to a letter that you won’t ever see. I don’t want to miss a single word or message or intonation or connotation or side notation or piece of imagination or cry of elation from you. That’s why I write you this.
So, send me a handwritten note, please.
