old-fashioned alors

Letter-writing is a magical thing because it's like a series of time-encapsulated bits and pieces of yourself that you leave with someone else for safekeeping. This trail of incredibly private, but also inherently and concertedly shared, form of communication between usually-two people.

Especially when the intervals of time between letters happen to be just the right length of long, you can kind of see what kind of person you were when you were writing your last letter -- the ways in which you wrote the things that you wrote to make them write back the way they did, on the subjects they did.

Apparently I was especially appreciative of poetry back when I last wrote. I remember that. Two whole "response poems" came back to me, but all I can do is appreciate the appreciation I used to have. And fall a little in love with this person I know almost exclusively through our letter correspondence, which, I found as I dug through my piles of PRECIOUS THINGS boxes, only consists of five whole letters from him, and I guess about six, maybe seven now, from me.

It's crazy how easy it is to fall little by little in love each time, because the action of letter-writing itself is not only incredibly romantic (why are old, outdated things so often rose-tinted?) but he's good at it -- it's lucky that we do this so infrequently and so horse-carriageishly, cause I'm sure if this correspondence lived on texts or facebook messages, there would have already been some kind of a denouement and resolution. With letters, there's ample time for the feels to fade away in between. And appropriately so. We've only met once, four loooooooong years ago.

Dear T --
Thank you so much -- for being patient and old-fashioned enough to go along with this thing, to faithfully write back to me every time I write to you, through all the address changes and country hopping, even with all the time in between correspondences; for being the person who gives me a tangible chance to remember my 3-months-ago self and what she appreciated and wanted to share with people she was sharing bits of her heart with. Little glimpses of my heart state in time-capsule form, in those pages that were sent - practically forever - away, but have always come back to me in the reflections of the pages that are sent in return.


Bon toi et moi, on est old-fashioned nous deux alors.