A few years ago, when a friend of mine moved to the USA, we kept in touch mainly via snail mail.
We emailed each other pretty frequently too, but the letters I received from her were the real treats. She'd send me till slips, with the price of an item circled and a note in the margin stating, “It's amazing the things you can buy here! Bet you can't find one of these back home…”
The letters were always decorative, with stickers or hand-drawn pictures. We used colorful pens when we wrote to each other, and took care to fill the envelope to the maximum weight for its size.
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Tuesday was my favorite day of the week; because it was the day the postman would leave presents for me in the postbox. I looked forward to those letters from her, and still have every one that she sent me. The letters took five to seven days to travel from side of the globe to the other, and the postage was quite a drain on our piggy banks.
When I read her letters, I felt as though I was sitting right beside her, listening quietly as she told me about her experiences across the sea. When she was happy, her writing frolicked merrily across the page, and when sad, her words became small and compacted. There was a lot of love ingrained into the fibers of the paper, and no matter what mood I was in, I always felt better for having read her words.
One day I noticed that I hadn't received a letter from her in a month or so, and realized that I hadn't sent her one in a while either. Panicked that maybe I was losing my dear friend to the ether of failed long-distance friendships, I raced to my writing box.
I spent extra time decorating the pages, selected the color sequence of the pens and then settled down to write.
I found that I had little or no news to tell her. She knew about the recent events in my life, as we'd chatted online the night before. What to say? What to say?
Writing letters to her had never been a chore before, and I was disturbed to find myself doodling on the page out of frustration.
Eventually I wrote how dear she was to me and how valuable I found her friendship to be. I told her that this would probably be her last letter from me, as we'd found a new medium with which to communicate.
Online instant messaging and social networking was exciting because it was instant, modern and efficient, and would suit our needs far better than this silly, slow writing by hand business.
And so we quite literally signed off letter writing.
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I enjoy the ease of MSN, Skype, Gtalk, Facebook or Yahoo. We have endless sites to choose from that offer instant communicative services, yet even when I see her on the screen in front of me, smiling or shaking her head, and hear her voice with a minimum of delay, I feel like we really are an ocean apart…
