I like to blog because it reminds me of how it felt to write letters. Don’t mistake me, I love a good email, but even long emails of the strong emotion/deep thought variety feel different from letters. Because emails are, well, e—as opposed to cp-mail (carrier pigeon) or mb-mail (mule back), or, my favorite, t is for tortoise-mail—you can ask how someone is doing and expect an answer. You can ask someone what she thinks you should do and expect advice. It might even be rude to write entirely about yourself. With letters, of course, you had weeks to wait before you heard anything back, and by that time you’d probably forgotten the whole contents of your letter, unless maybe you were writing someone to ask if they loved you.
An email can be whatever you have time for, but a letter only exists because you had time to sit down and do exactly that. I’m not sentimental about creamy stationary and fountain pens (which mostly make me think of the extra-terrestrial looking blue-stained lump that appeared on my ring finger from clutching the pen so hard). I just liked the way that writing letters made you aware of what was really up in a peaceful, unhurried, solitary-but-not-alone sort of way. I mean, you either wrote about the most important things or pointedly didn’t write about them, but only through the writing or the avoiding did you figure out what those things were.
And I liked that everyone understood the letter writer was going to write about herself, that she was alone in the company of the reader: safely separated by time and distance, safely held by knowing the letter would be opened. Writing letters to my mom from camp was one of the first things I did that made me feel grown up, or, I guess, growing up. This is who I am! The letters said. Of all the things I did today, this is what I choose to tell you. You cannot observe me. I am apart from you. It’s up to me to tell you what’s important, which means I have to decide, which means I can keep secrets if I want to. And what will happen to the things I did that I don’t tell you about? Who will I be if I’ve done something no one knows about?
We all do things all the time we choose to keep private or not, but there’s something about the written record that gives these decisions special weight. Writing letters as a kid and an adolescent let me create a history of my life, but running alongside that history, or underneath it, was the secret history of whatever I didn’t write. So the history was really a story, and writing those stories was practice for writing a novel, which is really all about figuring out what to keep in and what to leave out.
So what’s a blog? In this case, a letter. A letter to my mom, who knows how to give one heck of a toast.
