More love letters, please.

Why I still send physical mail

I inhabit a country of pocket fodder, a paper based place. It can be easy to grow frustrated with Germany’s total disinterest in digitalisation. Any task you try to complete is subject to a slow, irritating process of printing, signing, and delivering, riddled with human idiosyncrasies and errors, but there is always a paper trail. The joy of living in a country that still makes regular use of the fax machine is that come Sunday morning, you can always figure out what you got up to on Saturday night. There are ticket stubs for galleries or concerts, receipts, passes for public transport, and small change littering the lining of your coat pockets to remind you of where you have been and who you are. 

I have a box under my bed in my parents' house which contains everything my eleven-year-old self thought should be saved in the event of a fire or flood or whatever flavor of apocalypse might befall us. It contains a treasured snow globe of Pompeii with ash for snow, a first-place gymkhana sash, and a stack of letters and cards. That little package of letters felt talismanic both protective and in need of protection.

I am grateful to live in this time of technology where, from the other side of the world, I can eat with my family and talk to my cat. But while neither my laptop nor pile of letters could survive a fire or bathtub, there is a real distinction between the loss of an email and the loss of a letter. The paper the writer chose, their handwriting, their signature—there seems to be space for a little piece of the writer in a letter. Maybe there is something in the immediacy of an email that is so convenient, neat and organised that it can't quite capture the messiness of personhood. Maybe waiting for a letter simply gives you room to miss people properly. 

Somehow, I feel closest to the people I love, not when I am talking to them but writing to them. I am lucky enough to come from a very cool family, the kind that still writes letters. It is in the moments when I am sitting by my window and bringing my letter's recipient to the front of my mind that I realise I have built homes for these people from words and impressions and I can call on them whenever I need them. It is not until I go to post that letter that I feel the distance between us, not until I send that small part of them from me.

I see the irony of writing an email newsletter about my love of the physical letter. I don’t pretend that one is more meaningful or romantic than the other, only that while the letter may not have relevance or convenience, it still has meaning to me and to those who write to me. I think there is a great deal of difference between writing to someone and communicating via comment. Most digital media formats encourage the comment, and while meaningful discourse can definitely be generated through that medium, I think the magic of the letter is that you reply in kind. You meet the writer of a letter not as a consumer of their content, work, or life but as another writer of letters.

“MORE LOVE LETTERS, PLEASE,” requested the red Poste Italia box in Venice by way of a crisp sticker applied smoothly over the rich red paint. There is something intensely calming about the physical things we receive in the post. It is now a rarity to receive anything in the mail other than bills or passive-aggressive notices from the previous tenant’s optometrist. Cards with ink stamps, postage stamps, stickers, and doodles in the margins give us tactile feedback with the messages they carry. They give the best wishes and fond love a shape and texture to hold in our hands and against our chests. We live in a distinctly visual digital age. We receive videos and pictures from anyone and everyone all the time. Pictures are great; a picture says a thousand words, but a postcard doesn’t need to. A postcard can say everything we need to hear in three—Thinking of you.