I’d written about “the pleasures of hand-writing letters you’ll never send” for Psyche in 2022 and am never not writing or thinking about letter writing.

I wrote a letter to my best friend last year. Hand wrote one, walked to the supermarket, bought stamps and posted it over to where she lives. I remember the content of that little letter too. A short dirge that had bubbled out of me impromptu. A few complaints about this and that. But mostly wide-eyed expressions of the beauty around me. How achingly gorgeous my first deep winter in Scandinavia had been. I wrote in vivid markings, descriptions and amorphous little etchings to her.

In that same batch I wrote a letter to my parents, in-laws, a friend who sometimes annoys me to the sky and one more friend. Those letters were mostly just expressions and suggestions of beauty, of joy and of all things being well. I didn’t expect them to reply, but I did want them to read and share that they received those letters.

This was more than a year ago. And its today that one of them has sent me a picture of my letter. The others made some sound, a kind of huffing, hmmm-ing about the letter when it reached them last year; nothing other than that. Nary a word about the things I had written addressed; not a peep about if they’d want my address to write me back.

This letter writing had started for me long back. But I had been cowardly and never really posted the letters to beloveds even when I lived in the same country, same city or the same postal code area. Alone, after work, nursing a glass or two of wine I had stumbled on a heap of handmade letter writing paper in one of the rentals in 2014 or so, and saved up that stash.

Was it providence then that the letterheads, those envelopes came along with a cache of tiny, sharpened pencils?

I was on a job, alone in a south Indian city, far off from everything else I’d known till then. Not my first time. I had lived and studied abroad just two years before that. But south India somehow stirred in me more cognitive dissonance than Cardiff had. It was an utterly aloof, alienating time. I had far too many idle hours after work, no friends, no food to cook, no endless wifi or immeasurable stack of books to pore through. I could say that’s when this habit had taken a hold of me.

But that would be incorrect. I was writing letters even before that. When I was a child (not a kid), and I had a slip of a request to place before my mother or a strange confession to void out of myself. I had written letters deep into the night, cutting hours of sleep, tearing pages off the back of books. I had folded in those pages some secrets, small misdemeanors and annoyances I feared she’d dislike. I’d addressed these letters to her and safely hidden them inside her purse, so she could only find them once she was at work the next day.

I had also similarly sent hand written long letters to cousins over summer vacations. Used various colours: neon, shocking pink, jet black, a swooning inky blue. What did we emote in those letters though? We scribbled designs and shapes. Told one another secrets not knowing that these letters were being read by both sets of mothers on either sides. Made plans about the summer, songs, books, friends. Showed off a little bit.

The short of it is that the habit found its way back to me once I moved to Sweden. You could say when I was once again remote. But that would be wrong. That is, in fact, incorrect.

More than a year ago in those letters I’d described in vivid details the seasons around me. Now I don’t remember what months I wrote them in or when, for that matter, I posted them. But I do remember writing impressionistic ditties about the changing seasons. It is early September, still warm, still green, still glowing. Deep shade and gold light. It’s impossible to step out and not notice the glimmer in its resplendent glory. A hopeless beauty. We’ve started counting back to the start of November, the dawn of endless winter and darkness. We’ve started our vitamin Ds. A year ago, in those letters I had written about all those details and how much they moved me.

The only person who replied was the friend whose idea it first was to send postcards back and forth. And I read her postcards at least once each day when I keep back the milk carton or pull out the plums from the fridge.

Then there are also those hundreds of answered emails. But surprisingly enough, I don’t feel too wounded about those. Or maybe I do, in my own small, quiet little jilted ways and refuse to fully acknowledge it.

On recent travels I’ve been gathering postcards and now have a drawer full of them along with some delectable Swedish postal stamps. I’ve been reading Virginia Evans’ The Correspondents, rife with thrill and sadness and sometimes want to write to someone who will actually treasure my words and reply.

Since 2020 I'd been trying to pitch an essay to NYT's Letter of Recommendation section and last year I do remember pitching them this writing letters/postcards niche idea. But the editor rejected it calling it “a little too esoteric for us” and just the next month published The Best Part of Any Piece of Mail Is the Stamp. I might've died a little bit inside.

During the summer I found a copy of Vigdis Hjorth’s Long live the Post Horn! at the library and reread it. It’s about the Norwegian postal service being discontinued. A desultory media consultant feels despondent about her job and doesn't recognise herself from diary entries from a few years ago. On an assignment to defend the rights of the postal service workers, she discovers her mojo and plots to help the workers out.

The actor Josh O'Connor, in a promotional interview with Paul Mescal, shared that he has a huge crush on Laura Marling and had once sent a postcard with nothing written on it just a leaf mashed up and pasted. Isn’t there something eternal these postcards and letters create? Inspired, I’d given a similar postcard to a friend visiting Sweden last October.

Anyway, I now have a crowd of letterheads sitting and the weekend isn’t too far off. The stamps are glinting at me too. I might sit down and listen to Laura Marling’s what he wrote a few dozen times, and then I’m going to write again, and then it’ll still be a golden September for a month more, and M and I are going to go hear Bob Dylan play a concert and hold hands and cry and sing along like we did in Delhi, and then it’ll be November and soon will come December and we’ll both go see friends, family and there will still be ice and snow and slush out on the streets in Gothenburg, and it is sweet to be alive.