Paper letters 💌

A form of communication that isn't really used anymore. Most envelopes you take out of your mail box would contain adds, bills or, at the very best, formal letter congratulating you on passing some government test or being accepted to a uni. But, that wasn't always the case... Did you get to write a paper letter in your lifetime? I remember when I was little, my grandma suggested I write to a girl from a different town, who I didn't know (probably a granddaughter of her friend?). We exchanged a few letters before the correspondence stopped. I don't remember anything about that girl, even her name, but I remember the appeal of writing a letter. Passing a message to someone. It was a game and an art form, though I was way to little at the time to think about why the process was interesting. I wrote letters since. To my grandmother, who never learned how to use internet. And to other people when speaking wasn't an option for one reason or another. I left a note in a library book to someone who might take that same book to read, like throwing a bottled letter into the sea, hoping to find a kindred spirit, a few years later when the library closed that section and threw the book away, my note was still in it. I doubt anyone read it. But still. Some authors enjoyed the idea of letters as an art form. The mindful though one puts into phrasing their sentences, when they know, that they wouldn't be able to immediately rephrase, if their message won't be understood. The way people looked for significance in their lives and their thoughts to actually tell something to the person on the other end, to paint a picture, to prompt though, to connect through words with someone they so rarely if ever meet face to face. Some of them turned their personal correspondence into small art pieces intended for only one person. Others wrote books imitating letters. Whole book can be made of letters characters write to eachother and nothing (or almost nothing) else. Have you ever read a book like that? The one I've read was called "Daddy long legs". About a girl who gets scholarship from an anonymous stranger as long as she writes him letters: because he believes she could become a writer and wants her to practice. Another interesting thing about letters is how they preserve history. I've once read letters at an archive. You can learn a lot about historical events, about what was on people's minds, even find some drawings. And sure those people probably didn't intend for people from our time to read those, but in my case letters belonged to family members, so I hope they didn't mind:) This post turned out to be longer than I expected. Happens sometimes when you begin to write. Do you have thoughts about letters? Have you ever written letters on paper? To a relative or to an imaginary friend as a form of diary? Or maybe a love letter as a romantic gesture for someone?