On Letter Writing

When I started this blog so many years ago, I had never published any of my writing and I had no experience writing blog posts. What I did have experience with was letter-writing.

I’ve been an enthusiastic letter writer for years, with pen pals all over the world— often hand-written, though these days all my correspondence is through emailed letters.

I’ve been thinking about letters a lot these days, as social distancing and grounded flights makes even the people I thought were most accessible to me feel far, far away. I’ve been mourning so much, including the lack of opportunity to make new friends or deepen old acquaintances without the ability to meet people, touch them, laugh together. But when I feel that sadness wash over me, my mind turns, consistently, to letters.

I’ve maintained so many close friendships through this kind of correspondence. I met my friend Stav in Israel in 2009 and as I think about it now, I think we’ve only been together in person twice since then (which honestly seems unbelievable). But we discovered early on we were both incredibly enthusiastic about handwritten mail, and so we’ve written each other letters more or less consistently for the last 11 years. (We used to stick with longhand letters, but after one of my letters went missing somewhere between Istanbul and Israel, we switched to emailed letters.) Our correspondence is how we’ve maintained and deepened our friendship over all these years— it is, in many ways, the main scaffolding of this friendship.

My best friend Kelly and I haven’t lived in the same place for more than seven years now, but we started emailing each other letters very early on when we were in college— sometimes snippets of poetry or weird history, sometimes long messages full of our whole hearts. We didn’t have smartphones in college and text messaging was more cumbersome, so we emailed. I worked in the study abroad office at my university during my senior year of college, and I would often use the time to write to her— though sometimes she would stop by the office to say hello immediately after I hit send. We even used to email when we were roommates living in the same house, she in her room upstairs and me in mine downstairs. When I moved abroad, we already knew how to work those muscles, and have continued sending each other the same sort of delightful letters we’ve always written. It’s one way we still stay connected.

I have so many stories like these, of friendships maintained and deepened through letter-writing. Sometimes I think it might be my favorite way to be in touch with someone, though it’s not the most convenient. But besides the glorious tug of connecting with someone face-to-face, what is better than a letter? It takes a level of commitment and thought that comes through and touches me deeply.

When I was at my parents’ house in December and feeling so far removed from so many of my friends, I decided to start a little project: Letters of Gratefulness. I would write a letter to someone I was grateful for every day of the month. This was inspired by my friend Will C and an exercise he’d done years ago called Letters to People I Love, though his were posted publicly and without specifying the subject; mine would be private and sent directly to the recipient. It turns out, though, that writing the letters was both rewarding and draining and I found I couldn’t stick to doing them every day; I think I managed to write a letter every three days and sent seven while I was in California. I got responses for some of them, but the replies were never the point— I wanted to sit down and articulate why someone was important to me, and tell it to them. I didn’t continue when I returned to Istanbul because I didn’t want to write a letter to someone and then see them the next day— I didn’t want there to be pressure to respond, even in person, to the letter. The distance in California made that easy.

But now I am as far away from friends in my city as I am from friends in other countries, or so it seems sometimes. I think a lot about my favorite line from one of the greatest poems, Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass: “Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.” We are separated now, and I am full of longing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be connected.

So here’s my proposition to you: in this strange era, when we are isolated for an undefined period of time, when the social bonds that bind us seem stretched or severed, let’s recommit to letter-writing. Let’s sit down in our locked-in spaces, open our email, and write to someone we miss, or someone we want to know better. Let’s build our bonds as best we can.

My birthday is coming up at the end of this month, and it looks most likely I will spend it alone locked inside my lovely apartment. Usually, I throw a big party, because all I want for my birthday every year is to be surrounded by the people I love. During the pandemic times of 2020, that will be impossible. When my friends ask me what I will do for my birthday this year, suggesting perhaps a Zoom Party, I say no. It’s not the mass of faces I miss, it’s the individual connection, the deep conversation you have in the corner of the party. Zoom doesn’t really allow for that.

This year, I want letters. I want to hear from the people I cannot see. I want to wake up in the quiet of lockdown, and still feel the connection and friendships that are so dear to me.

I want you to write to me. I promise I will write you back.

(The photograph at the top of this blog post is a collaboration with Alison Luntz, from our project The Dreamspace Between Istanbul and NYC.)