Ergil: Writing a letter doesn’t have to be a formal event

In a time with a million ways to stay in touch, staying connected in a way that doesn’t slowly degrade into faceless pictures over Snapchat or an occasional text can be hard. Losing connections with the people you care about can be scary and disheartening. Through young adulthood — a moment when your physical location, time zone and amount of spare time is often changing — it seems you are always trying to build friendships somewhere new, spending lots of time on your phone trying to maintain connections with those you are not geographically close to. I felt this way coming into my freshman year of college. I had met some of the best people in my life at a summer job, and in two months we had become unreasonably close. But none of us were great at or enjoyed staying in touch through texting, and we were all off doing our own new things when fall rolled around. It crossed my mind that letters could be a fun way to stay in touch. Everyone likes getting mail, and a letter is a great way to let friends who you don’t see often know you are thinking of them, that you want to tell them about your life and hear about theirs. Bringing it back to the classic days of pen-pals. The idea was there, putting it into action was not. Somehow, it turned into a daunting task: finding how to put things into enough words to justify a letter. I felt I had to say something important, and so it would often sit unfinished. I stayed in touch with these friends, getting together for New Year’s every year since that summer, but it was not until over a year later, after our second New Year’s, that I would be able to crack the code of the letter. What is so great about texting is the immediacy — when something happens that makes you think of a specific person, you can tell them. We do it with our friends who we see every day, letting them know about something […]

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