crosswinds

love letters and birthday cards.

I don’t believe in birthday cards. Not if I’m going to see the person face-to-face, anyway. I don’t want to write down my good wishes, I want to say them. I think it means more spoken aloud.

But when you tell somebody happy birthday, or get well soon, or that you love them, it floats in the air for a second and then dissipates.

It doesn’t last. It doesn’t exist, once the vibrations settle. And then, 10 seconds later, it’s as though it never happened. Writing it down is holding on to the words for a little longer. Putting it up on the mantlepiece, reading them back. It’s as though they exist again, playing in your head in the author’s voice. It’s like they’re really there, telling it to you firsthand. It gets to be real again. You get to have those feelings again.

Barthes described the intention of a love letter as “having nothing to say, but it being to you that I want to say this nothing”. I don’t think it’s having nothing to say. I think it’s wanting what you say to exist a little longer.

It keeps the words alive. And if the words are alive, then so is the joy, or the calm, or the love. We get to believe in these things a little more deeply. We hug each other a little tighter in the crosswinds.

Love letters and birthday cards aren’t replacements for speaking kindnesses to those we hold dear. They don’t counterbalance neglect, or make wrong right. They don’t stand in place of affection. A page isn’t love in a trench coat, it’s love framed. It’s a monument, sentiment embalmed and displayed, saying that I meant what I said. That you can hold me to it, because there’s a record. And that makes it real, and you can touch it, and trace your finger over the grooves.

We shelter ourselves from the furious doubts with scrawled handwriting and smudged ink. We tell ourselves, people might not mean what they say, but they mean what they write. They wouldn’t have written it otherwise. We don’t hold ourselves back. We don’t try to contain it. We scramble back from the precarious edge, clutching pages to our chest, using these pages to stand and to walk. We stake our lives on text messages and hurried notes, on voicemails and envelopes through the letterbox.

Writing it down lets it live forever. And you can be forever young, reading the faded pages, riding through the crosswinds.

happy valentines.