I write
letters – it’s what I do. Writing to someone is an act of love for me, and having
others write to me was, and continues to be, a source of great comfort and
joy.
However,
it has been a while…a really, really long while since I could bring myself to
willingly pick up the pen and write – whether it’d be for the sake of my oft-forsaken
introspection, the occasional birthday letters or, for that matter, the rare
piece of prose.
For words
once written read the same regardless of the time that may have passed. Words
that mean something, at least at the time of being written, and it is not
difficult to fool oneself into believing that they continue to mean something irrespective
of the context leading up to it and thereafter.
As it
stands, what had once been a source of great comfort was now a mockery of the
very things it represented. My much treasured collection of postcards and
letters, instead of standing testament to the fact that I was once loved and
cherished, were now reduced to bitter reminders of what I once had and
subsequently lost.
It was as
if the written word had stopped being my love language.
However,
things do find a way of coming back to you. I’d have the occasional friend
sending me pictures of notes I’d written to them long ago. They were reminders,
as sporadic as they might be, of the fact that perhaps, my words did mean
something to others, if not in the same capacity as they meant to me.
Yet the
reminders coalesced into a singular, definite realisation only when one day, a dear
friend happened to ask me if I still had the letter she had written to me by
way of farewell, when she was in her final year at our college.
While
I looked for that specific letter (so that she could have a picture of it as
well), I wound up leafing through my collection once again. I was steeling
myself for feeling that familiar anguish that I’d come to associate with all those
words, but her letter served to remind me instead of my capacity for love and kindness.
That I mattered enough for her, and in hindsight, all those others who wrote to
me, to earnestly endeavour towards penning it down.
And
here is why I finally found myself willing to pick up the pen after all. For
time will pass, people will change and move on, but their words remain unchanging, indelibly printed onto the
parchment of their time, their relationships
with us. And we write, not in order to be remembered in perpetuity, but to
leave behind testaments to our best selves. For others to remember us by, even
if they have little else to go on with.
And
so I shall write. So that I may be remembered, fondly, lovingly, as I remember the
others.
