The first letter arrived dated March 31, 2020. It was from a close childhood friend, later turned college roommate, with whom I regularly keep in touch via instant texts, FaceTimes and phone calls, as most 20-somethings do.
“The sun has set on our 15th day of quarantine/social distancing,” my friend wrote, his chicken scratch still familiar from our days in grade school. “Isn’t it crazy how quickly this has become the new normal?”
He’d alerted me that the letter was coming in a text: After many days of nonstop Zoom calls for work, the last thing he wanted to do was look at another screen to catch up. Plus, he said, writing a letter could be a fun creative exercise to break up the monotony.
So I wrote back. And then I wrote to another friend and another, and lately not a week has gone by when there hasn’t been a letter to respond to. In most of these exchanges, there seems to exist this unspoken code of slightly formal, performative language meant to evoke the past. My childhood friend’s first message, for instance, included a florid analysis of John Keats’s maritime isolation off the coast of typhus-plagued Naples in 1820.
“There’s something about the ambience of the room,” he wrote. “The gentle fire, the nautical aura, the fact that I’m writing a note — it makes me feel like a captain off on an expedition in a foreign land, writing back home.”
It adds to a sense of emotion and escape, yet hardly detracts from the ability to write candidly about our wide range of current experiences. I’ve written about bird feeders, good movies and family; I’ve read friends’ letters about fishing and homesickness and Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera,” in which the young Florentino Ariza writes thousands of love letters during an epidemic in Colombia.
Frequent correspondence by mail is fairly new to me. When I was in fifth grade, we had a pen-pals program with a class in Australia, but when the school year ended, my pal and I fell out of touch. Anytime I travel afar, I try to write to my family; somehow I always tend to get home before my letters do.
But like so many other things in this otherwise-terrifying global quarantine, I’ve found writing letters to be wonderful in the simplest of ways. For each one, I sit at our dining room table for the better part of an hour, away from my phone and computer, with only a sheet or two of blank white printer paper in front of me. I’m hardly able to keep a regular journal without it feeling like a chore, but writing to someone else is sending a fresh entry off into the world without ever having to look at it again.
In return, I’ll be left with something far more interesting than a mundane account of my own pandemic days: a patchwork of pages that were sent to me by others, each one fresher than the next.
