LOVE LETTERS FROM CAMBRIDGE

A week before my best friend’s wedding, I wrote her a letter and snail-mailed it to Singapore.

There was nothing in the letter that she had not known already – that I remember how within two hours of first meeting each other she made me laugh so hard I choked on water, how these past 10 years we have grown together from awkward teenagers to awkward young adults, how much I believe in her relationship having seen the hoops they jumped through to be together, how touched and excited I am to see their reunion of love, and that she deserves every happiness in this world.

Sitting at my desk writing the night away, I thought of all the letters I had written in Cambridge.

In the pandemic years when mailing travel postcards became a habit of the past, and life was stagnant in Cambridge, I wrote a lot and I wrote more letters, handwritten pages filled with trivial rambling sent out on no-occasions. On the occasion that I crossed a street, saw a painting, or heard a melody that made me think of you – you my family, friends, old teachers, mentors, unfathomably special you, you who made a difference. There was never truly any important message, but snippets of thoughts, reminiscence of memories, and my well wishes. To add to the impracticality of it all, I sealed my thoughts in an envelope and let the wind take them. Unromantically speaking, the USPS. Some letters arrived after days, weeks, even months. Some never reached their intended destinations. Some got lost on my way to the post office (my bad). Some never got sent. Some hurt to write. Most made me smile. Regardless, each one of them I thought of as a love letter, love being the unbreakable bonds of family, friendship, companionship, mentorship, support, encouragement, and gratitude.

I have grieved enough deaths to understand the fragility of life. Knowing any letter could be the last letter to or from someone, I cherished letters sent to me even more. Moving cities to cities countries to countries continents to continents, wherever I go, the little treasure box of cards and letters follows. I carry them with me, they carry me through life, the tiny to and from postal codes themselves a form of collective journal 01002, 75006, 100010, 921-8043, 02138, 06507, 90015, 10012, 700000, 11374, 94020, 140056…

Unfailingly, letters had to be hand-written. There is something powerful about the hands as a tool of self-expression. Handwriting, playing music, hand drawing. The hand-mind-heart connection never fails to grasp me with formidable power. The delight coming from the meticulous exercise of cursive writing is comparable to making art. But if drawing suggests and music implies, writing reveals. When the hand races to catch up with the mind, my unpolished words flow from sincerity. In a world busy drowning in the digital flood of information and the instant impatience of email and text, the analog unhurried inefficiency of handwriting brews intimacy.

Listening to the sound of pen scribbling on thin paper against the solid tabletop, I wondered if this table has a soul, if it has sensed every stroke of my sketches, and learned every word of my stories. Bursts of emotion, bouts of creativity, slices of my inner world etched on its hard white surface, an invisible palimpsest of my growth.