On my desk shelf, wedged between an assortment of books I have not touched since syllabus week and a massive salt rock I impulsively bought at the National Aquarium, I keep a glass box crammed full of love letters.
I won’t even try to pretend these are romantic messages from would-be-suitors, former flings or ex-boyfriends. My high school love life — and let’s be honest, a good portion of my college love life — teeters somewhere between laughable and nonexistent. Instead, these are letters from people I love.
Among poetry, postcards and notes-scribbled-on-napkins, the glass box contains a crass birthday card my best friend wrote when I turned 18, a note from my dorm RA before she graduated last year, a letter from my aunt which accompanied a bracelet — long since lost and meant as a pick-me-up first year when I thought I wanted to transfer schools — the anonymous valentine I received in fifth grade (turns out it was written by my friends, but at least I got to blissfully operate under the fictitious belief that I had a secret admirer), the seven-page letter of advice my dad wrote me before I left for college and, more amusingly, the letter of advice he wrote me before I left for beach week.
A couple of days ago, I reopened the large glass box for the first time in a while. Emptying the contents on my bedroom floor and leafing through letters I’ve been collecting for over 10 years, I realized how they are tangible reminders of people I’ve been immensely privileged to know. Some of these relationships are now distant, and some are lost entirely.
I reopened the box because I had a new addition: a letter I’ve probably read over 30 times this past week. Written by someone who became a really prominent part of my life these past six months, it was simultaneously lovely and upsetting. It was a goodbye — a temporary one, I hope.
I’m exceptionally lucky to have experienced the relationship the letter is based upon. And I’m indescribably thankful for the entirely new and different world I’ve been introduced to in the last six months — and how much I’ve learned from it.
Ultimately, there’s something raw and completely exposing about letter writing. And in this vulnerability, there is sincerity. While we live in a world better connected than ever before — where a quick “catch up over coffee” is a mere text message away — the ease of communication today has cost us a certain degree of intimacy. Despite — or perhaps, as a result of — our connectedness, we’ve become more closed off, casual, indifferent.
Unlike a quick text, letters require a much greater degree of thought and introspection — they exhibit a lot more care. People will walk out of your life or you will walk out of theirs. But that doesn’t necessarily negate or cheapen the time spent together. I don’t know what the future holds for the aforementioned relationship, but I hope he knows I have a profound love and appreciation for what it has been.
Tori’s column runs biweekly Fridays. She can be reached at t.travers@cavalierdaily.com.
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