Coffee and ink are thicker than electrons

In The Secret Life of the Love Song, Nick Cave leads us on an illu­mi­nat­ing digres­sion about a cousin to the love song, the love let­ter. He says that the love let­ter has the pow­er to bind the loved one, to blind and imprison as the recip­i­ent is recre­at­ed from the writer’s imag­i­na­tion, cre­at­ing the lover anew in paper like Pyg­malion with his stone.

Me, I nev­er trust a woman who writes let­ters, because I know that I myself can­not be trust­ed. Words endure, flesh does not. The poet will always have the upper hand. 

I dis­cov­ered let­ter-writ­ing only when my last medi­um-term rela­tion­ship end­ed. She told me that she want­ed to cut off all com­mu­ni­ca­tion for 30 days. I was too entrenched for that; I could­n’t abide by it. So I bought a note­book and filled it. I wrote to her every day, some days I would past clip­pings from mag­a­zines or pho­tographs in, but in the end I filled both sides of 100 pages of a com­po­si­tion book in 30 days. I hand­ed it to her after the peri­od of imposed silence was up, and nev­er heard any response to any­thing I had writ­ten. I sup­pose that if she were smart, she prob­a­bly chose not to read it, but that thought only now occurred to me.

Some­thing appeals to me about the hand­writ­ten let­ter, and I don’t write long­hand very often. Most­ly I stick to the cold effi­cien­cy of my com­put­er’s key­board, where on a good day I can pound out a word every sec­ond. But see­ing hand­writ­ing is akin to hear­ing a voice or watch­ing pos­ture and body lan­guage. It per­mits us to get to know one anoth­er on a lev­el beyond the sim­ple choice of our words.

A lit­tle over a year after the 100-page let­ter to my ex I began writ­ing to a young woman in Jor­dan, and we exchanged let­ters for sev­er­al months while con­tin­u­ing to con­verse by instant mes­sage. For her I relearned low­er­case let­ters and made trips to the sta­tionery store to pick out suit­able paper and envelopes. I even wrote one of my let­ters to her using a crowquill pen and hold­er, dip­ping the pen in the ink every few words.

My next oppor­tu­ni­ty to write love let­ters came in the desert, where I sent bicy­cle couri­ers to deliv­er my notes to a woman who was stay­ing in a tent no more than 100 meters from mine. She’s the only one in the last three years who I’ve met face to face who also got let­ters from me.

Today I sent a let­ter to Yas­mine in Tehran, who has­n’t let her­self be seen online by me in four months. Although I’d sent her a pack­age with a brief note once, I nev­er wrote a full let­ter out. After I began work­ing at my cur­rent job, I became unable to spend the kind of time I’d devot­ed to con­vers­ing online with some­one eleven-and-a-half time zones removed. The sched­ule did­n’t work out and I was eager to impress my employ­er, so the hours that I spent chat­ting with her online became devot­ed to work instead.

Yas­mine became offend­ed when I offered my excus­es, and she just went away. I don’t know whether she’s blocked me or does­n’t use the same IDs and address­es she used to, but poof she’s gone and I’m left think­ing that per­haps I could have done more not to take her for grant­ed, even while keep­ing my bound­aries about time.

So today I left ear­ly to meet a friend at a cof­feeshop and I made sure that I’d have almost an hour to wait. I brought my pen, the Rotring 700 (ahh, they don’t make them like that any­more), and the onion­skin «air­mail» paper that is brit­tle and translu­cent but which per­mits mul­ti­page let­ters to fit under an ounce so that a sin­gle eighty-cent stamp will bring it to the oth­er side of the plan­et. I did­n’t write an epic. I just wrote out that I am sor­ry, and that I miss her.

I did­n’t men­tion the tat­too that she inspired, and I did­n’t send the gift that I thought about send­ing. No mix CDs and no dec­la­ra­tion of impos­si­ble love. Just a page and a half of «I’m sor­ry, I miss you» in my own hand, with my own pen.

This is free­dom. I don’t need to let her haunt me any longer. Either she will respond in some way, or she won’t. I’ve done what I can, and I think for the first time I did­n’t over­do it.