On Valentine’s Day in 1992, I was in a very involved relationship with my Macintosh Classic. I thought it was adorable and fascinating, couldn’t stop looking at it, couldn’t keep my hands off it.
I was wholly unaware of its limits, or my own for that matter, of our own potential and expansive futures. With the internet years away, the only thing it was hooked up to was an outlet, and I wasn’t going anywhere, either.
The deep homesickness I’d be nursing was finally starting to lift, but I felt no small amount of nostalgia for everything I had left behind when I went away to school.
So what did I do on that romantic day? I sat there and tapped out letter after letter. To people I loved. For them, but also for me.
To my best friends and lost friends, boys I liked and boys who liked me (they were not always the same boys). I wrote to my Aunt Helen, to my Uncle Bob. My friend Liz at Middlebury. My mother. I printed them out on my dot matrix printer, tore off the perforated edges, and mailed them.
Letters mattered. People still waited for them. This was before we began our one infinite virtual conversation via text, percussive and predictable communiques that punctuate our days.
Letters were juicy. You’d read them a few times. Meanwhile, I almost never go back and look at texts unless I’m trying to remember what time we’re meeting up. I certainly never linger over them.
What if you wrote a letter today? To someone you really, really care about. Someone you miss. Someone who’d love it. Maybe it’s a letter you should have written years ago, and maybe you think it’s too late (it’s never too late).
Let’s do it. Here is a little audio session I recorded–it’s just 15 minutes long, and by the end of it, you will have written a letter that matters to you, and could matter a lot to someone else.
(It’s part of a larger selection of recorded writing sessions — 30 of them — for my 30 Days on the Page program. If you’re into that kind of thing.)
But I really just thought you’d like THIS one, today especially. And so might someone else.
>> Go ahead! Write a love letter. With a fountain pen, vintage Mac, doesn’t matter.
Enjoy–
-Terri.
If you like that session, you can check more out here: https://territrespicio.com/30days/