My wife and I wake up to furious rain and wind so mean that NYC’s Department of Emergency Management warns drivers of empty trucks that they could be blown off the city’s bridges. We have no choice but to take a few of those bridges to pick up our daughter Q from college after her junior Fall semester has ended, but luckily we only need a rented SUV to bring her and her college life home. Normally she just takes the train or bus back to NYC for the wrapped and bowed month between semesters, but she will study abroad in the spring and has to move all the way out now.

The end of a year encourages the imagining of new and better selves, but I’ve long abandoned New Year’s resolutions; I could never manage to bring any of those selves into the world and got tired of feeling disappointed in the one that showed up. Still, last holiday break, Q and I got to talking about the joys of receiving mail — the surprise, the care, the thoughtfulness, the keepsake. We not so much resolved as decided to guarantee some joy by writing each other letters throughout 2025.

And we did. During the months that she was away at college, every now and then a letter from her would appear in my mailbox, and I would send one back. Q can craft almost anything, and she curates her envelopes with gorgeous stamps (Goodnight Moon, e.g.), drawings, stickers. She writes her letters by hand, too, with a readability that comes from years of journaling and drafting stacks of poems and essays. She likes to slip an artwork or flyer into the envelope, something from her life that made her think of me. I’m not as good at the aesthetics — my handwriting is a confirmed calamity — but I also send stickers or bookmarks or copies of a poems with my letters printed or hammered out on our Olivetti Lettera 32.

I can confirm that opening your mailbox to an actual person writing specifically to you is a joyful surprise, but I was more surprised by the joy of writing letters. I’ve gotten inured to the ever-expanding methods of electronic communication — the email, the single and group text, the chat, the microblog post, the direct message on every possible app. Texts and emails, even fun ones, tend to be transactional: did you see this video, you should listen to this song, I’m at the restaurant, what did the doctor say, etc. And the pull to respond transactionally, and immediately, is so strong. To be left on read is social calamity.

Writing letters confounds all this. Immediacy is impossible: Sending paper through the United States Postal System means not receiving a response for weeks, if ever. (Letters can get lost or put in the wrong mailbox, and a person can get busy.) Accordingly, Q and I have developed a set of unwritten rules for our written correspondence. We discovered that letters take about five days to travel between us, and we don’t expect each other to respond quickly. We never discuss when we drop a letter in the mail so that we preserve the surprise. When we receive a letter, we text each other a photo of the envelope, usually with an emoji (❤️ or ‼️ or 🤗). We also tend not to talk much in person or electronically about what we write to each other beyond, say, a recommended poet or a passage from something we’re reading that snagged us. We still send each other countless texts and DMs, but we have essentially begun a new conversation, unhurried and thoughtful, with its own cadence and life.

I’d also forgotten another brilliant aspect of hand-written or manually-typed letters — namely, that you send the entire thing away. There is no “sent” folder or text chain that you can scroll back through to see exactly what you said: That bit of your mind now belongs only to them. I still have letters that my father wrote me when I was in college, which I cherish now that I no longer have my father.

When writing, I have to work my way into a letter. I usually start with the weather or the way the sun in the sky makes the city look. Producing a letter is a physical act that takes some time, and I realized that this is my way of helping the person better imagine life on my end at the moment of writing. I’ll likely tell a story about Q’s mother or brother doing something typical but funny; she is always curious about them. Then I often find myself rummaging around in my past for a story relevant to a current theme, such as (lately with Q) what my trip through college was like, or how the question of who I could be kept asking itself to the point of annoyance, despite my not knowing the answer and anyway being unprepared to listen for one, then or now. Things are so different these days that my path isn’t a good plan to pull from a shelf of selves, but I hope that it’s still instructive in that I too stressed, avoided, lucked into, most things. I end by asking whether she needs anything and by hoping she is well — the last bit a wish that she can hold in her hands.

Q is ready for us. She has been up all night packing, and it doesn’t take long to fill the SUV, even in the sideways rain, and set out for NYC. She will live with us for a month and then leave for a semester studying abroad in Europe. I love having her home — she is so clever and funny and has read every book ever — but I’m excited for her to leave so that she can begin a wonderful transformative experience (and so that I can start writing her letters again).

If I were to write to 2026, what would I say? I would probably begin with the recent snow, enough to call out the plows and fill the city’s curves and corners with fresh canvas. Then I would mention that I (finally) finished and was ensorcelled by Moby Dick, and maybe also that line from Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s poem “A Great Many Things” about running a feather’s “shimmering vane between your knuckles” to see “how it was held together by peeling apart its hooks and barbs,” a reminder of the fragility of things but also that something so light and delicate can lift a creature into the air. And I will ask, with an earnestness that I’ll find embarrassing at the time but will warm to later, that the year to come be less cruel than the one that left, that our health be kept, that we all encounter much joy and notice and share when we do.

Finally, to keep the letter from collapsing completely into prayer, I would probably mention something about the 25 songs M wrote and shared last year and the many shows he played, unfurling his whole self on stages in front of friends and fans and strangers, making me think that everything would work out. I would probably end with the story of how after dropping Q and her stuff off at our New York apartment, my wife and I used the extra hours on the rental car to pick up a Christmas tree that was on sale in our old neighborhood. We chose one that barely fit in the space that accommodated all of Q’s separate life, so tall that the trunk rested on the dash and the back door made its tip bend. It looked so dignified standing in our new place.

Q closed her last letter with “Miss you and everyone dearly always.” I know she does, but now I can read this in her own hand, then fold the paper back into the creases it learned in the envelope on the way to me, and hold it for as long as I like.

As for 2026, I guess I’ll wait and see what — and if — it writes back.

Very truly yours,
RM