The Modern Day Love Letter

Texting is the modern day love letter but how are you supposed to keep them? I have a tin of letters from my first love. Countless professions of love, one more tortured and true than the other.

I have, on the rare occasions that I’ve found myself in the 3rd floor storage room of my parent's house, opened up the tin to rifle through a few letters that span an 8 year push and pull long distance romance. All the other relationships since have relied on email to send messages of love, and the random notes attached to flower deliveries. At least you can keep emails though there is no evidence of a tear stain the smell of cologne or dare I even say DNA left behind from sealing the envelope shut, but fine, there's a record...you were loved by someone and you have a time and date stamped document to prove it.

So now, as new relationships and flirtations arise texting seems to be the new mode of communication, which not only doesn't keep well for posterity but offers limited space in which to profess. I hope that’s no correlation to the space one holds in someone else's heart.

The old jr high note that may have been passed to you by the first guy to scribble “will you go with me?” on a scrap piece of paper is now replaced with a text questioning whether or not your dynamic is destined to remain a friendship. Trust me, the latter is not without it's charm but there's no cyber texting tin in which to keep it for future reference. You must be sure you don't delete it and scroll through the myriad of crap that your phone is now capable of storing and sift through it every time you want to tell your friends exactly what he said, what witty retort you had and exactly how many minutes it took him to respond with something which clearly indicated he didn't get the humor through the allotted character space you were given. Plus, things like hope to see you soon even lose the little spark they were intended to create when written as hope 2 c u soon.

Someone please bring back good old-fashioned pen and paper. Think of it, whole generations that have never put a stamp on anything in their lives and we wonder why the post office is cutting back it's hours. Plus, no generation has gotten to the stage in life when they're looking back on all the technostalgia and have to show their grandkids their emailed love letters and the love text conversations they transcribed to a word document for safekeeping.

I'm so glad to have 8 years of love letters in storage. I think I'll sign different names on all of them. By the time I'm old enough to go back and look, I'm sure I'll have forgotten who they're from anyway.