I learned early on that writing letters and cards to the people you love is a kind and even important thing to do. As a child, I would invariably receive some sort of nice writing paper as a present for birthdays and Christmases (and often still do). I would be encouraged to put the pretty papers to use straight away in the form of hand-written thank-you notes to grandparents, aunts and uncles and friends. My sister and I would leaf through our family’s overstuffed address book to diligently copy out the vaguely familiar street names and postcodes onto neatly stacked envelopes, ready for posting.
This was all fine and well, but what I really wanted was a pen pal, someone my age to write to just for the fun of it. When I was about nine or ten, I got my wish. While on holiday in Spain, I met two other girls my age and we made fast friends during our week in the sun. (Nothing bonds pre-teens like competing in and winning the kids’ club talent competition by dancing and lip-synching to Atomic Kitten’s cover of The Tide Is High.) At the end of the holiday we swapped home addresses and promised to write to one another. A couple of weeks later, two fat, sticker-encrusted envelopes landed on our doormat. I was finally in my pen pal era! Our trio’s letter-writing petered out after a while (I hope you’re well girls, wherever you are!) but it marked the start of a lifetime of long-distance correspondence between me and my friends.
Distance has characterised the shape of so many of my friendships. When I moved away for university, my best friends either stayed in our hometown or went off to study elsewhere. My girlfriends from my uni year abroad live in Germany and Canada. So many of my friends have made moves to London - and most have now come back. Others have gone to work in France and the USA and Denmark and Australia. I have more than one friend who I can joke with that we’ve never lived in the same place for more than six months.
Now that we’re in our thirties, we have moved both closer and further away, our orbits stretching and contracting as our lives take new directions: marriage, children, house moves, new jobs, new partners, new starts. Throughout it all, the hand-written notes have kept us connected.
Even as young adults with access to early social media and smartphones, there was something about the intimacy and surprise of a letter from a friend that never lost its allure. Of course, we texted and called as well, but it was the long-form missives that contained the real depths of our friendships. Letters addressed to individual bedrooms in university halls. Cards illustrated with stylish women drinking cocktails and ‘This is us in ten years!’ written inside. Postcards from holidays and art galleries and museum gift shops that signalled inside jokes and wish-you-were-heres. A CD of a personalised playlist alongside a letter slipped into the plastic cover. Novella-length emails and protracted Facebook Messenger replies sent late at night and read excitedly with breakfast. Neatly folded airmail paper and pages torn from notepads, illustrated with marginalia of us. More recently, a congratulations-on-quitting-your-toxic-job note, or a heartfelt 'I can’t believe we’re 30?!' letter tucked inside a birthday card.
These days, the long-distance letter writing is more likely to look like a series of texts exchanged every month or so, or a voicenote that drops like a personal podcast with no expectation of an immediate reply. The confessional catch-ups are now saved up for when we do see one another in person, whether that’s once a month or once a year.
As for all the cards and letters, I’ve kept many, many of them. They’ve come with me through several house moves, some of them in frames on walls or tacked to pinboards, most of them wrapped up in the same brown envelope, stashed away under the bed. I’m not a nostalgic person by nature; I don’t routinely ‘get the letters out’ and read through them. But when I do come across the collection, either during a house move or a clear-out, I’m glad. They are reminders of the smart, funny and generous people I am lucky to know and love. The people who make me feel loved too, because I know what it means to take time out of your day to stop and write a message to someone. The people who, no matter where they live or how long it’s been, I will always look forward to hearing from. And I hope I always do, either on the phone, over a coffee or via a postcard that simply says 'Saw this and thought of you'.