Return to Sender
Hello, my friends. I’ve been silent for a long time because, you know, life. Which in my case meant two major operations, neither of which were fully successful in solving the problems. But we must press on.
Recently, when I was looking through my desk drawers, I came across a bag of letters I had written to a close friend, which she had given back to me when she was clearing out her cupboards. They dated from school days to the advent of email, when writing letters all but stopped unless they were from an official body. My handwriting went from childlike to adult scrawl, and by the 90’s they were typed, either on a typewriter or a word processor.
We lived close to one another in our youth, so the early missives were sent either when I was on holiday or she was. Later, when we lived in different cities or different countries, they were the only way of keeping in touch, apart the occasional expensive phone call. Some of these letters were only a page or two (usually containing apologies and excuses for brevity) but some ran to six or seven sides. The tone changed over the years. In my early and mid-teens, I was keen to show off, writing for an imagined posterity who would unearth my letters and praise them for their keen wit and astute observations. I saw myself as a young Jane Austen. I don’t know if my friend enjoyed them or just thought them pompous (which they were, a bit). When she gave them back to me, she said nothing about their eloquence, only how amazing it was to have this record of our youth. Which was true.
At that time, I was writing to entertain, not to communicate. There was nothing in those letters about the turmoil I was going through and the pain of recognising that my parents weren’t happy together. I would have disintegrated if I had put these thoughts into words, so I stuck to my pseudo Jane Austen. Gradually, I learnt to be honest. There was still some cheesy humour in the letters I wrote to her when she lived in Canada, but only to ease her homesickness. My account of missing her was dressed up in hyperbole and I sent news from the auld place in a way that would make her smile.
By the time I was in my mid-twenties and living in London, I was writing about being unemployed, signing on to get welfare benefits and how hard it was to climb the career ladder, a part of my life I had completely forgotten. It brought back the overwhelming-ness of being an adult in a big, anonymous city but also the fun of going to cool restaurants and bars that no longer exist, and of meeting people I no longer see because they moved away, sometimes to the other side of the world. There’s still evidence of a need to entertain, but with a wry touch to it. Then came the typed letters. Still a little humour, but now mostly serious thoughts about injustice, feminism, work and relationships. Then a few years later, descriptions of daily life with a learning disabled child, and of the impact on siblings (who were, to be fair, still doing cute things, duly noted in the correspondence).
And then that was that. We started communicating by email and now on platforms like WhatsApp. An on-going, real time conversation, sending photos and making video calls from anywhere in the world. These days the only traces we leave are digital ones, not physical pieces of paper that now smell of dust and were once the high point of somebody’s day. Is that sad? It is, a little. I guess today’s biographers and tomorrow’s historians will have to trawl through Tik Tok and Instagram accounts, blogposts and tweets, trying to build up a true picture of the person behind them, unless their more personal messages are still available in the ether. I’ve heard that letter writing is making a comeback amongst Gen Z, but we barely have a postal service these days, so I doubt it will be widespread. And if all the ginormous data storage facilities were destroyed, it would be as if we never existed.
So I’m going to hang on to these letters, a concrete reminder of the person I used to be, a dim and distant relation to the person I am now. Nothing new or original here, because reflecting on how-it-was and how-it-could-have-been is not new or original, just a facet of being human. But oh, how intimate it was to write a letter to a close friend, and how achingly intimate it is to read them now.