A Perfectly Beautiful Letter

Some of my favorite letters are beautiful imperfections. Laced with cross-outs and written in crooked, uneven lines, they betray unfamiliar hands atrophied by lifetimes of computer use. Others are barely letters in the traditional sense: postcards, particularly thoughtful birthday notes, a collection of 3x5 index cards I asked my closest college friends to fill out however they chose. Some are personal, short, and casual — more “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (2:33) than “Purple Rain” (8:41). The letter’s specific form matters less than its sheer, unyielding physicality, a fleeting moment of personal thought and action made manifest. Ink still shimmers on the page and forms sentences easily smudged by a stray finger.
These letters terrify me in their rawness, their ability to wholly immerse me in the intimacy of their pages. I keep them in an old accordion file that I open only rarely. When I do, those minutes stretch back years to high school, to summer friendships, to whenever it was that these relationships so brightly burned and left a fragile imprint of themselves upon my physical world. Time and circumstance have dimmed many of these relationships, though few have flickered out entirely. Perhaps it’s fitting that these letters can bring me such joy but can later be so easily lost.
Sent just after we graduated together towards destinations apart, a high school friend’s letter speaks of memories shared and futures imagined: cities we’ll visit, art museums we’ll “be pretentious in.” I read it in a voice I can imagine immediately but hear too rarely.
Growing up, we always had a separate closet for my mom’s stationery collection. She studied literature and became a professor; her love of books morphed easily into what I used to think was an indefensibly large number of notebooks, cards, and inks to complement her beloved fountain pens. She joked about how healthy and cheap this addiction was compared to what she could be spending her life on.
Like her penchant for black coffee and her insistence on making the bed every morning, I only recently came to understand my mom’s stationery obsession. On a brief trip back home to Houston, I asked my mom for some extra stationery for letter writing. Beaming, she clapped her hands. I think she might’ve even jumped in the air. She disappeared into her closet, returning minutes later with a box of oddly-sized, thick paper in wonderful shades: muted greens, soft beiges, faded blues. “Anything you want,” she said.
I chose three crisp sheets of a melancholy periwinkle blue. A letter I wrote on it took a wistful tone — or perhaps it was because I knew what to write that I subconsciously chose the color in the first place. I wonder how differently my words would have rested after dancing on a light pink or an off-white.
I write and rewrite emails, but I can’t bring myself to re-do a letter. I see it as a betrayal of the form itself. Like an uninhibited conversation, handwritten messages take their beauty from the unforeseen paths our articulated thoughts can take. Once born, a letter brought into this world should live but one life, as imperfectly formed as it may be.
Save for the few times we interrogate our histories, the comforting immateriality of memory leaves ample room for a kind of storytelling about how we came to the present. We remember broad outlines of what used to be and grow comfortable floating within these reservoirs of a constructed past.
Old letters can rupture these careful narratives. A friend’s written word is steeped in an immutable declaration that we, together, occupied the world in a specific way. I see names I haven’t thought about in years and wonder how many other letters and how many other names have faded. I guess letters, too, fall victim to the same unknowable forces that deceive us into drifting away from homes, recollections, people that we’ve forgotten about but would bring us joy were they to exist in our everyday. But they cannot. They occupy the past and infrequently enter our lives in the same way that letters reside separately from the present, appearing occasionally to brighten our days with slow-braised sentiments and intimacies deliberate, moving, and perfectly beautiful.
