🍀The Warmth Residing in Letters

Ever since I was a student, I have loved writing letters.

Even now, when I go to a stationery store, I find myself stopping in front of the shelves lined with colorful letter sets.

The texture of the stationery,
the small sense of tension in the moment of sealing the envelope,
the extra effort of applying a stamp.

For me, all of these
were precious moments for delivering words.

However, nowadays,
the number of people who write letters has decreased significantly.

I think that for people in the past, writing characters was a completely normal and everyday occurrence.

Thinking of someone, writing about the seasons, and entrusting one's heart to paper from the tip of a brush.
In every single character, that person's warmth must have resided.

Now,
what you want to convey can be delivered in a few seconds by opening a smartphone.
A convenient era.

With more people not even sending New Year's cards, the opportunity to encounter handwritten characters has, before I knew it, become something special.

That is precisely why I feel a little bit of loneliness.

When I was a student, I loved cars, and I once drew a car illustration and submitted it to a car magazine.

I still cannot forget the joy and surprise of the day it was published in the magazine.

That magazine had a pen pal corner.

It is unthinkable now, but back then addresses and names were published, and I took the plunge and wrote a letter to someone who liked the same car model.

A reply arrived after a while.



I can still vividly remember the pounding of my heart the moment I opened the envelope.

The person was a male university student living in Osaka.

For many years after that, we exchanged letters.
He was a sincere person who would properly write back to my clumsy teenage prose.

The content of the letters was
not just about special events.

Things about the seasons,
things about recent events,
things that made me happy,
things that made me feel a little down.

I would write about such casual days on stationery, and we gradually got to know each other's lives.

We never met even once.

Even so, every time a letter arrived in the mailbox, I was happy as if his warmth had reached me from afar.

I was always looking forward to writing a reply.

Looking back, I feel that those pen-pal exchanges taught me more than just how to write.

Thinking of the other person while
choosing words.
Carefully
examining my own feelings.

That warmth also resides in letters.

Each sheet of stationery quietly taught me such things.

The pen-pal exchange that lasted for many years,
eventually started to have longer intervals,

and it ended naturally without me even remembering the reason.

The end was all too quiet.

Even so, that time still lives on within me without fading.

That is why I am still captivated by stationery sets.

Opportunities to write letters have become rare.
Even so, just holding a sheet of writing paper makes the me of those days smile softly at me.

Words can be delivered instantly
to the other side of a mobile phone screen.

However,
the frustrating days spent waiting for a reply,
and the ability to wrap up and deliver the warmth of a person,

I still believe that only letters can do that.

Rose🌹SONO🍀

Afterword🍀
I tried turning nostalgic memories into an essay☺️