I was a teenager when my mom was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US. We left Guyana and moved to America for two years, she in Albany and me in Miami.

All my friends were back home in Georgetown. I remember buying a box of letter writing stationery from Eckerds Pharmacy to pen snail mail to one high school friend in particular.

How I’d eagerly wait for her mail to arrive. Envelopes from her were always plump and bumpy. She used whatever paper she could lay her hands on — paper with frilly edges torn from her notebook, three-ring binder paper. Always papers of different sizes and weight. Like Rachel’s letter to Ross, she wrote front AND back.

Those letters sustained me, kept me in the loop with what was happening back home, with our friends, and kept our friendship alive.

How I enjoyed her letters! Relished the anticipation of them, then reading them over and over again.

Before replying, I always waited a day or two, thinking about all the things to cram onto the paper.

A hundred years later, we’re still friends. She’s the only person from high school I’m still friends with. Perhaps writing those letters helped in some way to keep our friendship alive.

At the start of the year, I suggested to her we pick up this tradition again and she agreed.

Why, in the time of WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage , would I even suggest such a thing?

Well — I loved what it felt like to open that mailbox and see a personal letter with my name on it.
Oh! The feeling of opening the envelope and unfolding the crinkly pages. No email or text message feels like that.

I appreciate how intentional it is. The slowness of it. Formulating my thoughts for a few days before putting them on paper. Once they’re on paper, I have to commit to them. If it’s not perfect, there’s no ‘delete’ button. There are two choices, clarify or start over.

I don’t love how frivolous texting could be, how unintentional. How we’ve come to celebrate everything with a gif or Apple balloons or Apple confetti against an Apple screen.

I promised myself that this was something I would commit to for 2025 — sending more mail. To my sister, my mom (who lives 20 minutes away) my aunts, cousins, my friends.

I make an evening out of it. I clear my desk, choose some stationery from my shop 🙂 or pretty writing paper and just start writing.

It doesn’t even have to be long. It could be a short note on a postcard.

I wrote a letter to that high school friend. Before long, I’d filled two sheets FRONT AND BACK. 🙂 Maybe I’d rambled on like Rachel had, but it was such a lovely feeling to fold up my words and put them in an envelope and imagine my friend receiving it.

Maybe, the more mail I write, the more mail I’ll get. At least that’s the hope.

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