Write to Me

As you check your mail, you notice a letter that makes you stop in your tracks. The envelope is old and crinkled, and the paper has turned gray with age. Despite this, you know you would recognize this letter anywhere. It was the first letter you sent to your best friend twenty years ago.

You and Angela were ten years old when Angela had to move across the country for her dad’s new job. The two of you had grown up together, and the idea of no longer seeing your best friend every day was heartbreaking. After Angela moved, your mother had bought you a letter writing kit and assured you that you could still remain close friends by being pen-pals.

The first few letters you wrote had felt awkward, nothing at all like the long afternoons spent together in your backyard. You had been able to communicate with Angela without speaking before, a trait one only learns after knowing someone so deeply it feels like your very souls have merged. Pen and paper couldn’t convey the same sense of deep trust. It felt hollow, at first.

The more letters you sent during that first summer without Angela, the more you had felt more comfortable with the craft of writing, managing to put a little bit of that old spark into your letters. There must have been a dozen letters sent during that summer alone. When you started the fifth grade, the letters became less frequent, but you were too involved in school to mind. By the end of the sixth grade, however, your old-fashioned correspondence had come to a natural end, drawn apart by time and distance.

You had still kept in touch with Angela through the years, just not through letter writing. Texting was much easier for a growing teenager, even if it didn’t carry the same spark or elegance as pasting wildflowers into a hand-written note. Your families met up once a year, then once every other year. By high school, it was clear neither of you were the same little girls you used to be and drifting apart was the next natural step in your relationship.

It was during May of your junior year of college when you heard about Angela’s passing. Angela had felt sick the night before, and her parents found her dead in bed the next morning. A surprise blood clot. The news had shocked you, and for a while you hadn’t known how you should feel. At that point, neither of you had spoken more than a few words in a year, and Angela was no longer the staple in your life that she used to be. It took you two days to cry, and when you finally did, you couldn’t stop for the next three.

Standing hunched on your front lawn, you hold the old envelope in your hands delicately, admiring it for the memories it represents. Someone has covered Angela’s address with your current residence, although the top left corner still bears the childish scrawl of your old address. When you turn the envelope over, you can tell the letter has been opened before, but resealed with paste. Emotions well in your chest, and you rush into your kitchen with the letter, abandoning the rest of your mail in the mailbox outside.

With delicate precision, you reopen your letter to Angela and begin to read. Tears fill your eyes as you recount how awkward your ten-year-old self had been. There are three pages total, dedicated to telling Angela every last detail of what she has missed since she had moved. She had only been gone a week at that point, but you had believed telling her everything would feel the same as if she had been there the whole time.

By the end of the letter, tears streak your face, and you force yourself to put the letter down and find a box of tissues. Angela’s parents’ must have found the letter recently, you think, and sent it over to you as a nice keepsake. You make a note to thank them later and slip the letter into the drawer of your nightstand for safe keeping.

The next day, a second letter appears in your mailbox. Your heart leaps, and you rush back to your house, eager to tear into the memories it offers. Your excitement reminds you of how you used to wait for the post man every day, tearing through the mail in search of letters from Angela. Your parents constantly had to remind you about how long it takes mail to travel across the country, but the excitement had always beat out your patience. Based off the contents, it seems to be the second letter you wrote to Angela during that summer. You tear up while reading this as well, but it isn’t as much of a shock this time around.

Every day for the remainder of the week, you receive another letter written for Angela. They are delivered in the order you wrote them, resealed on the back, and have no indication of who is sending them. You call your parents to get Angela family’s contact information, but when her family finally responds to you, they tell you that they have no idea who is sending the letters. Sweat beads at the back of your neck, despite the air conditioning churning through the vents.

Her parents remember you and Angela being pen-pals as kids, but they aren’t aware if she had kept any of your letters. If she did, they assume the letters would be somewhere in the attic with the rest of Angela’s old things. After confirming her parents will search for them, you hang up, completely confused. If Angela’s parents are not the ones sending the letters, then who is? Who else would have access to your correspondence from twenty years ago?

The next two months are filled with more and more letters in the mail, one each day. Fifty letters arrive at the end of it all, finishing with the last one you ever wrote Angela. Her parents never managed to find the letters amongst Angela’s things, so either someone took them from their house, or had acquired them even earlier than that. But what was the point of all of it? Was someone trying to be nice by resending you pieces of your past? Or was someone trying to scare you?

Your paranoia spikes when the letters stop because you don’t know what the next step is supposed to be. You didn’t write anything more, so you aren’t sure if the mystery person will send something else. Like themselves. They do have your address, after all.

Each night, you fall asleep with your bedroom door locked, the TV blaring in the living room, and all the lights on. It takes a while to adjust to sleeping like that, but it’s better than feeling like you’re being watched from every window of your townhouse.

One night, after several desperate hours of trying to ignore the bright bedroom lights in your face, you admit you can’t sleep. With nothing else to do, you begin rereading your letters to Angela. Somewhere around Letter 10 you notice something out of the ordinary. On the top left corner of the first page, someone has written the letter “W“ in purple gel pen. Your heart races as you recall Angela’s habit of writing back to you in various colors of gel pen. She had gotten them the birthday before she moved away, and she had been giddy when she realized that being pen-pals was the perfect opportunity to use them.

Hands shaking, you fish all the other letters out of their envelopes and place them in order on your bed. In the top left corner of each first page is a different shimmering letter. Gathering a pen and paper, you jot the letters down into one long, incomprehensible string. It takes a few minutes to parse out the breaks between words, giving you the opportunity to read the sentence they spell. A feeling of ice trickles runs down your spine, and you find you cannot swallow around the lump in your throat.

“I have Been waiting so Long to play with you Again

Love

Angela.”

The lights in your room flicker, then switch off.