6. Gratitude (JW)
San Francisco, CA
Dear Owen,
I just moved into a new apartment, and I have a ritual whenever I move: once I’ve unpacked my practical belongings, I explore the sentimental belongings contained in my shoebox of memories.
The box itself has changed form a few times, but at the moment, it’s a box for a pair of NRS Kickers. NRS Kickers are kayaking shoes which I’ve never seen before, because the box itself was gifted to me. When you and Tommy left to tour the world, Tommy left me his pair of noise-cancelling headphones in this box.
The box has a poem inscribed on it in sharpie. On the outside, it says
For Jamie,
⠀⠀⠀⠀To listen, and move with it
Chains glisten, you groove with it
And on the inside
Or read a bad poem, and cringe with it.
Enjoy the headphones!
⠀⠀⠀May it cancel out the noise in your life.
I’m not sure what “chains glisten” means, but it sounds classy.
Within the eclectic mess in my shoebox the following can be found: two badminton medals from tournaments in Waterloo where I got entirely carried by my team, a set list from Porter Robinson’s Second Sky, a signed playing card from a magic show in Oslo, my high school ID from Ottawa, and a black apron with “Mum xox” stitched into it with golden yellow thread, complete with a recipe for Yorkshire puddings.
Given the length of our friendship, our shared memories have rightfully claimed representation in the box.
There’s the train ticket from when we went to Cinque Terre and took entirely the wrong route (though we did still manage to find the infamous behind-the-fence lemonade stand at the end of the path). There’s the ticket from the ship ride where we made stop motion videos going down the hallway, once having a person walk out of their room and look directly down on me lying on the floor in front of them. There’s the ticket to Burning Man for the year you led our camp and I made a collapsible tea table to fit in a bike trailer.
But whenever I peruse my shoebox, it’s always the letters and cards and postcards that get me. I have a few for birthdays or for work anniversaries or departures which I appreciate, but the ones that mean the most to me were motivated by nothing other than an overwhelming desire to tell me something.
I have messages from friends, from family, from coworkers and more than a few from ex-girlfriends. One of my favourites though, because it was totally unexpected, is from you.
The envelope, at first glance, seems like anything else you might pull out of a mailbox. Your real Waterloo address is in the top-left, but the destination address is:
Jamie Wong
Hella Far
Kitchener, ON, Canada
In place of an actual stamp in the top right, there’s a hasty doodle of a stamp featuring a person I can only describe as the offspring of a Sesame Street puppet and the focal subject from Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”.
I don’t think either the address specificity or the stamp veracity would hold up to Canada Post inspection, but they didn’t need to because you handed me the letter in person.
Once opened, the envelope contents unfold into two pieces of paper. The first sheet is a disclaimer letter typed in some generic handwriting-ish font that begins:
Dear Friend,
Don’t be alarmed by this letter. It is not a harbinger of bad news, nor is it a confession of my love. It is simply an expression of my gratitude.
The second sheet is addressed to me specifically, and is handwritten. It contains exactly what the cover letter foreshadows: an expression of gratitude, complete with the following glorious sign-off:
I think we’ve had enough of the cheesy “this past year wouldn’t have been the same without you” spiel so tl;dr: U R KEWL. SANKS 4 EVERYTHING.
I inevitably end up with a big goofy smile on my face whenever I read this.
The “Dear Friend” cover letter also contains this:
A small part of me hopes you’ll like this enough to do something similar for those you care about, and maybe that’ll cascade and turn this into one of those viral chain mails. You know, the ones from back in the day when spam didn’t get filtered properly that said “if you don’t forward it to 10 people you’ll die alone” and stuff like that. But with real, tangible mail.
While I didn’t immediately run off and mail ten letters out of fear, I have begun looking for opportunities to express gratitude. Sometimes it’s a simple Tweet to a stranger to thank them for writing something that was helpful to me. Sometimes it’s been sharing stories over Slack about what it was about some of my coworkers that made me want to join Figma. Recently I sent a long message to a past dance teacher that was really influential to me explaining to them why their class meant so much to me.
“If you ever have a nice thought about someone, tell them. Whether it’s at work or in life, everyone needs to hear nice thoughts.” My past manager at Figma, Sho, shared this bit of wisdom among many others on his birthday this year. Whenever I see opportunities to thank someone for something specific, and to explain what it meant to me, I get kind of excited now! It presents a kind of opportunity to create a kind of authentic positivity in the world that warms my soul.
Last I checked, your sentimental belongings were safely kept in a large plastic bag. Both that you kept them, and that you kept them in a big loose plastic bag were gloriously on brand when I remember you showing them to me in Waterloo.
May many others’ letters of nice thoughts accumulate in your bag, and yours in theirs,
Jamie
