A Friendship Through Letters
Read Time: 5 Minutes
Words by Jess Lambert
By the time I was 12 I had already had a couple of pen friends, the first of which I’d met on holiday in The Netherlands, camping with my family, being most memorable (aside from meeting said pen friend) for the rain. I still recall cycling back from the beach with towels over our heads to protect us, the campsite flooding over night and the fire brigade coming to pump the water and dig trenches. A few years later I found myself responding to two adverts in a magazine my brother used to get, called Aquila, and hoping for a couple of nice girls I could write to. I had no idea what was to come.
What started with B was to become one of the most powerful relationships I’ve ever encountered, something neither one of us could have imagined or predicted when we wrote those first letters back when we were 12 years old. Something that felt so completely natural to us both. There’s something about the time lapse between the words we wrote (or these days record on a voice message) that allows for a different kind of communication to that which occurs between our other friends. It’s more like story telling than a conversation and we are the main characters.
Out there in the world is a person who knows my inner being, sometimes better than I know it myself, who I have met only a handful of times. I think I can count them on one hand - we each visited one another as teenagers, and then I went to B’s wedding and leaving party and I’m pretty sure there was another trip to Scotland one year. She now lives in Australia. Scotland had once seemed so far away from Cambridge, but that now pales in comparison to the distance to Australia.
We wrote letters for years, regularly in our early to mid teens and then less so as we got older. At 18, I moved to university and then on to varying towns and cities, and though our letters became less regular the foundation had been laid. All of those letters we wrote from the age of 12, detailing our lives, our loves, our hopes, our dreams in such vividness, with such clarity, gave us something that no one else had. I’d had many pen friends, but none like B, who opened her soul to me and allowed me to open mine to her. We agreed we were kindred spirits.
I had a couple of close friends through school and we would have what we called ‘deep and meaningful’ conversations, but they couldn’t compare to what you could say in a letter, when you didn’t have to think about what words to use next according to someone’s facial expressions or body language - you could say it all and it also came with an understanding that came with time. Time to think about what the other person had written, time to formulate your response, with a pen, rather than your mouth, time to think about what news was most important to put in your own letter. In this way the not so important day to day gets left out, forgotten, and the parts of your life that you really want the other person to know get written. It might sound like a slow burn, and in some ways it was, yet we became close friends quickly, much quicker than we might have done in real life.
There is an energy in letters that cannot be captured in face-to-face communication, yet I can’t describe what that energy is or how it works. We’ve often wondered, in fact, whether we would have been friends at all if we had met at school because from the outside we are so very different and moved in completely different circles.
I think back to how we never spoke on the phone (though we likely could have) and our ‘ voice messages’ were the occasional tape we would send each other. Back in the day, when WhatsApp was a distant dream, something out of a sci-fi movie maybe, we would sit in our rooms with blank tapes and record ourselves and then share our favorite songs of the moment, some from other tapes and CDs we had, some recorded from the radio, because that’s how you rolled as a kid born in the ‘80s. These days, with the myriad ways one can stay in touch with people all over the world, we still choose to send voice messages, rather than do ‘face to face’ real time chats and maybe that’s because that’s how it’s always been. I mean, it’s not to say that we haven’t gotten on like a house on fire when we’ve met, but our default appears to be, still, to have the time between each message to listen, digest and then respond.
Sometimes you read stories of pen friends who have been writing for decades, of those who were lost and then found again and I’m glad B and I never got so lost we weren’t able to stay in contact, despite life taking us down roads we had never imagined, despite my nomadic lifestyle and ever changing addresses. I recently read about how the coronavirus pandemic resulted in the art of letter writing making a come back and it left me feeling nostalgic for the process, the sitting down with pen and paper and allowing the words to flow onto the page.
There’s a creativity to it that is lost in todays rapid fire social media and the immediacy of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and all of the other ways it is now possible to communicate with people. When sending an email or voice message you know it’s with the other person in a matter of seconds. With a letter there is a journey involved. Those pieces of paper pass through the hands of so many people, sorted in big warehouses, travelling on trains and planes and in the vans of the postman on their rounds before they eventually get posted through your letter box. Then there is the joy of opening and holding in your hands something created just for you.
We are such a privileged generation to have the means to contact each other in such an immediate way, but I sometimes wonder about what is lost. There is a slowness and a patience that needs to be cultivated when writing and receiving letters that we don’t seem to have any more. Even B and myself have had times when we’ve left voice messages for each other on a daily basis, which has been amazing - we’ve supported each other through some crazy times over the last couple of years - but even we have lost that sense of slowness, of patience.
Maybe the slowness of letter writing needs to be re-cultivated. Maybe we need to re-invest in this creative process. Thanks to the pandemic it is now deemed fairly ‘normal’ to meet people and cultivate friendships online and I think for many it has shown us that slowing down is ok. The art of letter writing also brings us back to ourselves. There’s no need to produce something for the ‘likes’, it is not for the world to see, it is simply words between two people that have flowed from the mind to the hand, which has produced a thing of beauty, created simply for a single reader. This is communication on a deeper level. This is the storytelling.
About the Author:
Jess Lambert is a singer, songwriter and poet, who dabbles in writing every now and again. She is a lover of coffee, cake, books and loves a walk in nature, which helps to clear the mind.