Ink, Wax, and the Lost Art of Letter Writing
Let me tell you something true about myself, a thing I don’t say lightly because the truth has a way of sitting in your chest like a stone you’ve been carrying so long you forgot it was ever heavy.
I was never cool.
Not in the effortless, magnetic, people-just-gravitate-toward-you way. Not even in the weird, ironic, so-uncool-it-loops-back-around way that becomes its own currency in certain coffee shops. No. I mean I was the kid at recess inventing elaborate solo games because the alternative was standing near other children and hoping, desperately, that proximity would be mistaken for belonging. It was not. Elementary school is a brutal ecosystem, honestly closer to a nature documentary about pack behavior than anything resembling civilization, and I was reliably at the bottom of the food chain.
Middle school didn’t improve my standing. High school gave me the gift of anger as a coping mechanism, which is the kind of gift that arrives without a receipt and ruins several holidays. On my best days I was chaotic, a live wire someone had coiled into a desk chair and told to pay attention to algebra. On my worst days I was something darker, something I’m not proud of, something that lives in the past where it belongs. I grew up convinced, bone-deep, that I was less than. That the default human experience included a dignity and ease I had somehow been issued without, like arriving at a camping trip to discover everyone else got a tent.
I am forty-five years old. I am, by most reasonable metrics, a functional and occasionally delightful adult. And I am still surprised when someone looks at something I’ve done and says, that’s cool.
Still. Every time. Like a man who keeps touching the stove to confirm it’s hot.
A couple years ago, I started writing letters.
Not emails. Not texts. Not voice memos or DMs or any of the thousand frictionless ways we’ve invented to lob words at each other without actually touching anything. Letters. By hand. On paper. With a fountain pen, which is, and I say this with complete affection, an absolutely cool instrument to choose in the twenty-first century, a tool that requires patience, practice, and acceptance that sometimes the ink will do whatever it wants and you will simply live with that.
It started because my brother lost one of his children. There’s no elegant way to write that sentence and I’m not going to try. Grief at that scale is a country with no roads in, you can’t drive to it, you can’t GPS your way through someone else’s devastation. But I could write. So I did. Every week. A letter, sealed and stamped and dropped into the mail, because in all that unbearable silence I hoped, not knew, not guaranteed, just hoped, that something tangible arriving in a mailbox might carry a few grams of you are not alone with it.
I kept writing after that. I write friends and family every Sunday now, two or three letters. I joined a site called Postcrossing, which connects strangers across the planet for the express purpose of mailing each other postcards. I have sent postcards to people in Germany, Japan, Brazil, places I may never see, from a person they will never meet, carrying nothing but the small strange proof that someone in Atlanta sat down on a Sunday and thought I will send a piece of myself to a stranger and trust the postal service with it.
I have not received letters back. This is fine. This is not the point.
The point is the deliberateness of it. The point is that in a world engineered to move fast, to scroll, swipe, consume, refresh, repeat, there is something almost radical about sitting down and saying, I am going to spend the next hour entirely in service of another person’s joy. No algorithm. No engagement metric. No reply button. Just ink and intention and the peculiar faith that the mail will figure out the rest.
And I have, I’ll admit, gotten into it in the way a certain type of person gets into things, which is to say: completely, joyfully, with no obvious exit strategy.
I designed my own stationery. I print it on paper that has actual weight to it, paper that says I took this seriously. I write with fountain pens and inks in colors with names like Midnight Blue and Autumn Oak, which is either romantic or ridiculous and I have decided it is both simultaneously. I seal the letters with wax, real wax, melted with a little brass stamp, because if you’re going to do something, do the thing. I have four wax seals in my collection. A fifth is incoming. I go to the post office and I ask for interesting stamps, the ones with birds or national parks or dead jazz musicians, because the envelope is part of the letter, the whole thing is the message from the moment it lands in someone’s hands.
It is, as hobbies go, quiet. Deliberate. Stubbornly analog. I did it alone in my office every Sunday without ceremony, without announcement, the way I have always done the things that mattered most to me, quietly, in case someone noticed and decided it was weird.
And then my wife noticed.
She noticed, and she didn’t say it was weird. She said she was thinking about starting her own letters. She said she’d been watching me disappear into my office on Sunday mornings with my pens and my wax and my careful rituals, and she thought, maybe she wanted that too. She was going to write to a friend in California. She might join me on Sundays.
I waited for the punchline. I am a man who spent a significant portion of his developmental years being set up for punchlines, and I know the shape of them, the little pause before the gotcha drops. I waited.
It didn’t come.
She meant it. She genuinely, actually meant it.
Now listen. I have accumulated a small and fiercely loved circle of people who think I’m alright. My wife is at the center of that circle. She is, objectively, a person with excellent judgment. But forty-five years of bone-deep less than doesn’t just dissolve because logic demands it, and so when the woman who knows me best, every chaotic, ink-stained, wax-dripping, stamp-obsessed corner of me, looks at something I do quietly, alone, without expectation, and says I want to do that too —
That lands somewhere different. That lands somewhere that’s hard to name but easy to feel.
I’m not used to being cool. Probably never will be. But if someone has to look at me over a Sunday morning cup of coffee and think yeah, that guy’s onto something — I’m glad, more than I know how to say, that it’s her.
