Love Letters

We are in a digital age.

With the modern technology, it is so easy to keep up with people. There’s email, phone, Facebook, Messenger, Facetime, Twitter, Zoom, blogs, and many more. Your messages can be sent instantly.

Nowadays you can have 1,000 friends, and a thousand more followers if you want. You can easily connect with your distant relatives, text with your grandparents, and tweet at celebrities and politicians. You can even easily connect with your loved ones who live in a different time zone.

But in all that messaging, we lose some of the personal touch. I know that love can be expressed in a myriad of different methods, but the most timeless and most treasured way will always remain the classic love letter.

All my life I have written letters – to my mother, my father, my siblings and nieces, to a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Correspondence has always been as necessary to my happiness as a well-cooked dinner, or a well-deserved rest.

Now that I am older, things have become so different to what they were in my youth.

When I was in grade school, my dad was assigned to work in Manila. My mother, my siblings and I had to stay with my grandmother in Negros. There weren’t any cellphones or internet then. If we wanted to speak to my dad, we had to take a tricycle to the town plaza to a local phone booth to make a call. Phone calls were short, and expensive too.

Since we couldn’t call my dad that often, I would write to my dad. So I would send him letters every now and then. In, my letters I usually shared with him everything that had happened to me at school, and how I much I missed him.

The post would come in occasionally. Letters were letters then, and they were precious to me because I knew that my dad had taken his time to write.

My mother also used to send letters to me here in Canada. When my nephew and nieces learned how to write, they also wrote me some cute Christmas cards. I still have most of them.

I have received hundreds of handwritten letters in my lifetime. But to be honest, your letters were my favorite.

There was always an element of charm and mystery to the letters you wrote. I could almost smell the fragrance of the place they have been mailed from.

While reading your letter, I would visualize you writing by the river, in the fields, on top of the mountain, under the bright stars – perhaps with a smile on your lips.

I could hear the birds singing, the water flowing from river, the raindrops on your feet, the gentle wind on your face, the tears rolling down your cheeks.

As you pour your heart out onto a crumpled piece of paper, I could sense your excitement, your courage, your fears, your pain, your heartbeat, your longingness.

Your words always spoke to my heart. You were faithful and thoughtful, and your love was gentle and true.

You taught me that letters are powerful enough to send the message of love. And while some letters remained unread or unanswered, it doesn’t mean you should stop writing.

Just because the world stops spinning doesn’t mean we should stop living.

Thank you for being so understanding and forgiving – and for showing me that a gentle and kind love truly exists.

I will be forever grateful for your presence in my life. I am a much better human being because of you. The experience of knowing you, loving you, was one of the greatest journeys of my life.

Though these words will probably never find you, I hope that you knew I was thinking of you today.

And that I was wishing you every happiness, and the gentlest love you truly deserve.