It is a nicer feeling to prepare, sit and write to you; in olden days, this would have been done in a nice – perhaps scented – paper, written with a beautiful black fountain-pen, seated against an open window, with a table lamp on the side, as the whole word is asleep after a day’s toil; with the curtains flapping its wings as the cool breeze from the paddy field or the woods outside would attempt to enter through windows, to eavesdrop on the whisper of thoughts within…before those thoughts are shaped into words and are carefully laid out on the paper for the eyes of the beloved to read, or feel, rather.It all gave way to emails; the curves and curls of ‘i' and ‘m’ and ‘b’ and ‘d’ and the letters of the like, the tails and wings of ‘g’ and ‘y’ and ‘q’ and ‘p’ that we carefully draw as we write, decorating the letters and words written in cursive to match the beauty of our thoughts, are now shortened to Ctrl+B to bold or Ctrl+I to italicize, taking away my ability to express the deeper sense of love that I hold for you, by writing for you a beautiful letter, to read, love and cherish.
We lost the joy of writing the words of our love, for us to feel the paper, , knowing that through those lines had moved the fingers that wrote those words of love, fingers that carried the thoughts of the heart that owned them. What an immeasurable joy was it to look at the smudged ink on the corner of a line or in the middle of the paper, where we conveniently imagined that smudge to be from the drop of tear from the thought of missing each other or smudged by the sweat through the lines of your palm from holding the pen as you sit fathoming the depth of love, jogging through the memory of path we walked together!
And the wait for the postmaster! There wasn’t a man in the whole of universe as important as the man in that khaki shirt and brown bag made of cloth; there wasn’t a sound more harmonious and longed for than the ringing of the bell of his bicycle; there wasn’t a wait longer than the wait for that sight and sound of the person who carried in his bag a little envelop that contained pieces of thoughts from heart beating my name miles away. The joy of receiving a letter quickly sink from the realization of the wait for the next one, and then it is a mission to read the letter, then the paragraphs, then the sentences, then the words, then the letters, then the punctuations, then the space in between…; they become your image, they carry your sound, they radiate your light; they reduces the distance of time and space; or so I believed, every time I read you.
It became easier, as time passed, to tell you that I am remembering you, by simply picking up a rose or a teddy bear from the ocean of world-wide-web, designed by someone in the Bahamas or Brazil; what is its beauty, O love, when compared to the beautiful leaf or a special flower that we plucked as we walked through the woods that we then stored with care and passion in between the pages of our books. The pages faded in time, the pigments of leaf and flower were all lost in time, yet how we retained the fragrance of that love we so well cherished in that memory.
In the space of modest needs and simplest expressions, where a bunch of blue berries to eat, a tender coconut to drink, and a garland of wild flowers to gift you, would have marked a grand celebration of our love, than the euphoria for instant expressions that stole the grace and joy of loving, living and longing.
I still want to write more; I still want you to give me leaf and flowers to keep in my book; I still long for the sight of postman walking towards my gate to give me that little envelope…I long for the olden days in the light of this new age!
Love
Note: This is a fictitious letter.
