Verba Volant, Scripta Manent

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.