Letters to Nowhere

I miss writing letters, old fashioned letters where you actually sit down and think about the other person you're writing to. Yes, modern technology allows us to update each other on our whereabouts, vent our frustrations, share our joy almost instantaneously. Almost at the exact moment we encounter something that intrigues us, our friends get to know about it via sms/facebook. It announces what we are, who we are at that moment to a wide audience. I feel, still, it lacks a certain depth and intimacy.


I used to have a penpal a long time ago, when I was just a little girl. I think she was a girl of my age from Germany. Our teacher managed to get us matched to penpals to write to, and then it was up to us to keep the writing relationship going. It was such a long time ago that I can only recall that she sounded so bubbly even in her letters. Her letters arrived in nice colourful envelopes and she had neat, rounded cursive handwriting. I on the other hand, never mastered writing in cursive, so it was always individual, blockish letters, not much different from my current handwriting. I made up for it by writing to her on my best paper, the prettiest designs that I always struggled to use, because all I wanted to do was keep them on my shelf, unused, and stare at them forever. But I would use it anyway, because strangely, writing on it was as pleasurable as staring at it, and I knew I would get bored soon enough anyway. This relationship was shortlived however, barely a year, if my memory doesn't fail me too terribly. I don't remember who stopped writing and why I never sent another letter to continue the relationship.



The second person I used to write to and with, was a very dear friend, let's call him/her T. This time round, we never bothered with nice paper or handwriting. T obviously knew of and shared my love of writing letters, so T bought us a shared journal. When T and I weren't spending time together, we would write to each other in this journal. I would write an entry, and pass T the journal the next time we met, then T would read it and respond. So the journal was passed back and forth, and constantly accompanied one of us each time we left the house. Its entries were read in the silence of our own bedrooms, on solitary bus rides, read and reread, savoured slowly and responded to and then past entries reread again. What thoughts passed through the journal? Everything that mattered to us. Raw emotions were laid bare on its pages, our joys, fears, insecurities, frustrations, at life, at each other. There was little or no inhibition as we talked about our past, present and future together, although I was always apprehensive about broaching the topic of the future.



This writing relationship lasted longer than the previous one with my penpal. The writing lasted 3 years, the relationship longer. The writing stopped when I couldn't meet the next milestone in the friendship and put up barriers to entry. And so the journal became unwanted property, because it held memories we no longer wanted to keep, and yet could not bare to destroy / discard it with our bare hands. I kept it in a shoebox and stuffed it in the corner of my wardrobe, together with other random letters written on cocktail napkins or torn out notebook pages when we didn't have the journal, but wanted to write to each other. Then one day, several years after the writing stopped, I knew I had begun to use the journal as a psychological crutch. Each time I wanted to retreat from the world, I would take it out to read, and pretend time had stopped and I had become Alice in Wonderland again. The memories shackled me to the past and crippled me so I never wanted to move forward. The moment I realised this, I knew I had to get rid of the journal, so I did, nice and clean. Not forgotten, but no longer attached, and I felt like I could run again and let the sun into my life, instead of hiding within the confines of my closet.

Now, I write letters to nowhere, to no audience, or perhaps to an open audience. Like a cruise to nowhere, there is no intended destination, but we enjoy the journey anyway, and we do find ourselves at certain endpoints, and it takes us by surprise and is all the more fulfilling. Sometimes I write stuff on impulse and when Vader reads them, I wish he would respond in kind, but I realise, I no longer need a response all the time, I no longer need to hang off every word in the response, when there is one, that is.