CORRESPONDENCE

I like getting replies to my emails, who doesn’t? But something sleek or thick, the writing flows and stirs and tilts my daily frame, coming in the mailbox wouldn’t be beyond the pale. In my former life, when I was full of need, perhaps because my body said I should breed. With no digital device available, I wrote letters of exquisite suffering and desire to my girlfriend during the summer break from college. I wrote with a fountain pen on onionskin paper, stipple finish. I had an artist’s garret in my mind, thus the notice-me paper, the ink pen, and the navel-gazing prose. That was prelude; waiting for her reply, of course her, la femme, muse to my existential furioso of prose agitates his days. Whatever mysteries in my being I needed to find, she had the breadcrumbs. Waiting wound up my romantic hope and despair to an aria measured by the distance between us. The US post office carried my tome-like envelopes of prose strangled by my crie de coeur from one of these United States to another. They land with a thud at my girlfriend’s home on a summer day as she enjoys freeing some skin to the vagaries of the wind and the looks of those not him. And there I’d sit like a festering toad in his storm cloud as if I ranked with the Sorrows of Young Werther by the brainy German of long ago. But there was no avoiding this waiting after walking to the mailbox, slipping in the steaming pages, and waiting for her to do the same. The waiting is the essential marinade for the meal that will come through rain, sleet, and snow; the postperson goes bringing her answer, basted with time. I will her to pick up a pen, knowing her fingers connect her arm to her heart and those eyes.

What was she thinking? He had to know. And the wayward time counted by days, soon a week or more passed. So romance, the stinging pangs of the heart had to wait, to stew in its exquisite juice, until the postman heaved hoed on your road. Now I could carry the prize for my eyes only, search every word for the more behind the door. Now that’s proper romantic training, as those who lived the drill can say. What were we to do? How to teach the other, how to absorb the pages, then sit with the task to correspond. Does that mean match up, connect up, touch the nerves of feeling big and small, depending on the mood and how sharp the distance feels, how drenched in need, perhaps one more than the other.

But in hindsight, it is a gift; distance and time conspire to elevate young minds to expressions of care and thought because she, the distant reader on the other side, the one who saw and held close the you being born in her answer. There is no letter writing like it, not to mom and dad, not to siblings, not to friends, especially if you’re that he, bobbing on the social sea. Is this now relegated to a quaintly archaic period equivalent to corsets and bustles, and waiting for visits from gentleman callers? How to tell? We were freelance romantics. What made it different from the instant-virtual-now was distance and slow time. The wait can give you the poetic sweats, open the door to more and more about this thing between the two of you, and who you are and want her to see. So this doesn’t happen so easily now. Measure the loss to our bustling culture? Maybe, maybe not, but what has replaced it is speed.

We are people mastered by speed, jigging like any puppet to its master. We want to be sleek, everything made real by keystrokes, and the device you stick in your pocket has more power than the computers that let us land on the moon. We, with stamp and envelope, rode time exploring inner space. Now there is the push; everything is loud and proud to be seen, even if it’s the surface of what it means: sexuality, bodies, cruelty, aggression, and raw need. I don’t know the to and fro of what it’s like to be on this rocket ride. I’m sure it has its thrills and spills just like we did. Still, to have this speed exacts a sacrifice. The bulky parts that slowed everything down took experience to maneuver. We’ve caught the virus of speed, glorified in the Futurist manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. Most of the Italian’s intoxicated prose is a guidebook of fascist thinking. It is a cautionary read. But some phrases capture what we’ve become. When he praises the “feverish insomnia,” “splendor,” and “fervor” of the modern city, factories, and machines. Correspondence, now a thing of a stroke, flies into the ether, then falls jammed between reminders from the dentist and asks for contributions to orphans. Seen fixed behind glass for a moment, pinned like a butterfly.