Last time I wrote a handwritten letter, it was the year 2000. I mean, an actual handwritten letter that I put into a sealed envelope with stamps and sent to someone halfway across the world – not just a postcard. I had special stationary and used gel pens (which were all the craze in the 90s) to write it. I had also put stickers all over it and signed it “Love, Nika”….the word ‘love’ is obsolete in the world of emails. The most you will get is a warm regards if you’re lucky. Otherwise it’s “Regard” (what does that even mean?). It’s like we’ve turned into robots. Our words seem more angular because we’re typing them. You can’t quite express feelings in an email. Well, you can. But, you can’t expect its recipient to understand or read between the lines. Emails are in their nature impersonal. I also put in some photos, you know, the type you had to develop a roll of film for in order to actually see them. I wrote stuff on the back of those photos, little notes about what the photos were and stuff.
Makes me feel nostalgic. Thinking about times when there were sticky notes rather than wall posts, letters rather than emails, handwritten poetry and prose rather than blog posts. Who needs penpals when you have Facebook? We don’t live in the same type of world anymore. We’re much closer together. It’s good. It also makes you miss those ‘primitive’ times when we had no cell phones and no Internet. Those days when we actually had to speak face to face to get the message through.
Well, letters are romantic in a way that the digital world never can be. I’m not just saying that to keep the postman in business, but there’s an art to letter-writing that simply doesn’t translate into the online realm where thoughtless words seem to dominate a screen and can be read in a myriad different tones and are often misinterpreted. Text messages too. But there’s something about a letter that is sweet…
When was the last time you read “Dear….”? Ah yes, as I recall, I started that letter off with “Dear”…or was it “Dearest”? Really old school!
Sigh. I’ve taken an 11-year break, but I think I’m going to start writing letters again, like the one below written in 1929 by Kahlil Gibran. A hopeless romantic.
Cyberbullying blog. 