My mother tells me stories of receiving love letters in her locker. She paints a picture of after school chatter with her friends, of opening a locker door that is cool to the touch — of the sight of an envelope laying there, waiting. Unlike the metal beneath her fingertips, her cheeks are warm.
At the top of my inbox, the red notification of an unread arrival blooms. My phone dings! in the next second, reading a simple, “just sent it!! :o)”, and like the emoticon at the end of the message, a silly little grin comes across my face. I open my laptop, my eyes bright as I open my friend’s latest email: their message just for me.
My friend and I have been emailing since middle school. Things have changed since then: at the start, it was a clever work-around; during a time when the home phone was more prevalent, minutes were limited, and (if you were lucky to have a cellphone) only a certain amount of texts were allowed per month.
Nowadays, everything is instant; it’s in the name after all, i.e. “instant messaging.” Emailing, however, though still virtual and within the online space, is the opposite of that. The difference that lies in the pressure to reply within a couple of minutes isn’t there. Taking your time, processing what was said — it is more than welcome to do that, and you have the space to breathe. There’s a wait present here; there’s an inhale and an exhale.
Intangible “snail mail.” You may be asking yourself, “What’s the point, here? Who would want something to come slower?” And I get it, as denizens of the information age, we have expectations of quickness and efficiency. However, I would argue that there is something nice about the waiting.
For isn’t one of the best parts about receiving a package the anticipation? The wait, the excitement of it finally arriving at your doorstep?
(My friend describes waiting for a reply like waiting for a carrier pigeon to arrive. The pigeon would have a letter tied to their ankle, a cherished little thing tied with a delicate bow. If either one of us tries to apologize for the delay of a more prompt response, time and time again we wave the worry off — our carrier pigeon simply got a little lost on its way home, that’s all.)
A while ago, I cleaned out my inbox. I tidied it up: unsubscribed from all the services that I could, deleted all of the spam, deleted every single college recruiting email I had received during high school, and anything that I did want to keep, I put into little folders labelled by year.
Each folder is a quaint chest. They’re time capsules, love letters from our old selves.
My friend and I still text. We still video chat. But emailing is a special treat that happens every handful of months; there is something liberating and vulnerable about it, something fond about it.
Something equivalent to hushed 2 AM whispers at a sleepover.
Love languages come in many forms — words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch — and in the same way, expressions of love manifest in different ways. Though the times may change and evolve, the way people love and care does not waver.
Perhaps the red notification that greets us is the wax seal upon our modern day love letter.
a look into our letters (and, perhaps, inspiration for what you could put in your own emails):
- a song analysis
- misc. thoughts that come and pass
- an exchanged list of YouTube videos (bonus: a bit of our personal commentary included with each video)
- a random personal “Top 10 ___” / tier list
- sharing our projects, whether it be something for school that we are proud of, or a project born out of our hobbies
- rambling about our current favorite piece of media
- sharing anything that we’ve been meaning to chat about, but haven’t gotten the chance to
- music playlists
- a mini essay on Victorian flower language
- discussing theories surrounding our favorite show/book/podcast/etc.