Please, Mr. Postman

I miss letters. Not that I ever received too many of them but I miss my address scrawled out on the envelope. The twenty-three-cent stamp voided with grill marks. The folded looseleaf and lines of blue script. Chatty paragraphs from pen pals or long-distance friends updating me on their lives. I's dotted with stars; T’s crossed with squiggly lines looking like a worm moving across a wooden stick on the beach; the vague scents of foreign places; the one-way conversation. I don't remember the last time I've received a letter, and I don't remember the last time I've written one. It seems like a relic of a bygone century now, a time when we'd condense months of information and thoughts and emotions into a few pages a maybe a picture. A time when my mailbox contained more than wedding invitations, birth announcements, introductory letters from mortgage brokers and credit cards, and that awe-inspiring color now known as “Netflix-Red” sitting in my mailbox. Between cellphones, email, Skype, text messaging, Gchat, Facebook, Twitter, myspace, and oh yeah, Blogger, it's still not difficult to remain detached from people who were once a large part of my life. We're all within reach now more than ever but it still takes an effort to remain connected. Remember those hand cramps you’d get from writing a lot? These days our hands are so out of shape I bet I couldn’t write a half a page before feeling the fatigue and strain in my left hand.

However, with communication being so immediate, we've lost the chance for our thoughts to stew and develop. Say goodbye to the poetry of distance. And with this immediate ability to communicate it remains an intriguing notion, look at text messaging-what are these people saying to each other? My guess is they’re saying very little but enjoying the means and context of having a conversation with a friend while being anywhere.