The Fine Art of Love Letters

He took the envelope from the drawer.

How long had it been there? Years, surely. He imagined it blinking in the bright sunlight, yawning as the sleep of this precious thing was disturbed.

He looked at the front. And sighed. That sigh he involuntarily made when he saw something delightful from his past that moved him.

There was her handwriting, recording his address. It looked so fresh.

Her happy optimistic handwriting, he had called it. It was the handwriting that said she was in love with life, would embrace it fully, would wake up each morning excited and would drain the dregs out of each day.

And there was the stamp on the top right.

The stamp that she had licked. Her tongue, her mouth, her soft lips, had been there.

Her beautiful mouth that he missed so much.

He took out the pages and opened them up. Again, her sunny handwriting looked back at him. The essence of her was in the paper. In the loops of the blue ink pen as she excitedly spilled out her racing thoughts.

Ah… you don’t get this with emails, he thought. He didn’t want to sound old-fashioned and someone stubbornly clinging to the past, but he still felt that a person risked missing out on a lot when they missed out on paper.

This paper, this envelope, she once held. It was a bridge across time.

If she had sent him an email, if emails had existed, then she wouldn’t have been able to hold it in her hands before it was delivered to him. It wouldn’t have been in her presence in the same way, it wouldn’t have touched her body.

He studied the paper again. Held it up to the light, as if it was some kind of vision. Yes, this delightful thing. She had touched this. It had been held by her hands.

Those same lovely hands that had held him tenderly. Those hands that had captivated him, fascinated him.

When they were in bed together, he had marvelled at the poetry of her fingers and palms moving, wanting, caressing him, exploring him.

Those same beautiful hands had held this envelope, this paper, guided the happily frantic pen across the page to tell him how much she loved him.

Magical. This letter, this envelope: they were absolutely magical. Together, they were a time capsule. They were bringing the urgent but distant past forward into his present.