Non-Fiction

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 2 views

In a box in my parents' loft there is a stack of letters my grandfather wrote my grandmother during the eighteen months they were apart before their wedding, and I have read exactly one of them, because reading further felt like trespassing on something that was never meant to survive them both. But they kept them anyway — not hidden, not thrown away, kept, in a biscuit tin, moved from house to house for sixty years. And I think that's the real subject here: not what the letters say, but the fact of their keeping. A kept letter is a strange kind of object. It has no function anymore. The message has long since arrived. What's left is only the evidence that it once mattered enough to write down and enough to hold onto — proof, decades later, that two people once thought this feeling was worth surviving the version of themselves that first felt it. We don't write letters much now, and I don't think this is really about paper versus pixels. It's about whether we still make things that are meant to be kept rather than simply seen. A kept letter says: this was true enough to last. I'm not sure our quicker messages are built to say the same.