I Wish You Would Write Me Letters

I wish you would write to me. I wish one day I would come home and there it would be, a battered envelope with my address and my name and your scrawl and a blot on the back where you dropped a slice of pizza. I wish that under all the mounds and mounds of bills and circulars, there would be your letter and it would be worth digging through reminders about responsibility and materialism just so I could touch the envelope. I would see the stamps you accidentally glued upside-down. I would see the tape holding the envelope shut.

I wish you would tell me about your day in chicken scratch on refill paper. I wish you wrote it out in painful detail and awful description filling three pages. You would write about things that made you laugh and it would make me laugh and over the length of miles and oceans and days, we would have laughed together in discordant sync. You would write about the mundane and the boring and the hectic. You would describe your failure of a dinner last night and the burnt toast and funny customers at work. You would complain about your ugly uniform and make an inside joke that I’d barely catch, but remember just in time.

I wish you had taken the time to sit down and compose your thoughts and tried to structure your letter in some way because I am important enough to take up that time. You decided to speak to me in pen and paper over watching another episode of House. You made a choice to talk to me in a way that might be even more personal than a phone call because it’s so much more effort and it’s inconvenient and you did it for me anyway. Maybe it was raining when you posted it and you forgot your umbrella, but you ran for it, hopping from puddle to puddle until you sent off a piece of yourself for my safekeeping. Those words would be mine now and you trust me enough to make such a gift.

I wish you would tell me you miss me. I wish you would spend lines replaying what my absence might mean to you. I wish you would write me a letter. I wish you would write me a long letter. I wish you would write me a short letter. Maybe a postcard? Please give me something I can hold and tear open and consume. It doesn’t have to be Lord Byron. It doesn’t even have to be Dr. Seuss. I’ll take anything you send and I’ll receive it with love.

Tomorrow, if I’m lucky, you might text me. You might even spell it out completely. You’ll leave the letter I sent you a month ago unanswered — the silent ghost of a note. You’ll forget about it, or perhaps think my letter to you did not warrant a reply. And I’ll huddle down with my disappointment that I dare not show. And I’ll be here, wishing that you would just write me one letter.