Ink, Paper and Everything Unsaid

Inside my bedside table lies a small gift box nestled among scattered pencils and diaries. A box that safeguards a pile of letters with pages preserving snippets of conversation that once dared to be forgotten, where each and every word silently calls to a story of its own.

The first letter I received was a “goodbye letter” when I left school in third grade to shift to a new school. I remember being pushed out of class by a bunch of classmates who had a surreptitious twinkle in their eyes. Later that day, I received a large sheet of colored paper with the words “Rishita 3B” written in bold. I opened it to see multiple writings sprawled across the vast expanse of the paper. Some words were huge, their letters proudly spaced out, while others were small and tiny, yet carried a heavy meaning. Some words were soft and gentle, the “t”s and “y”s curling around the ends almost as if they were smiling back at me. Some letters were neat and flawless, while others were written in a hurried scrawl, the pen struggling to keep pace with their racing mind.

Back then, I was too young to understand why receiving that letter felt oddly intimate. In hindsight, I know why. I realized how handwriting is often an imprint of the soul, and that’s why it lingers. The grainy texture of the paper, fold lines, coffee stains, and fingerprints all leave traces of presence behind. Traces, I find, are filled with such sensory richness that they transcend digital ephemerality and create a sense of permanence. 

One of my favorite letters was one that I received from a close friend of mine after graduating 12th grade, a time when we bid adieu to high school life, silently rejoicing in the adventures (and misadventures) that had shaped us. I read it aloud the very same day, streams of happy tears pouring down my face. I remember my mother looking at me with concern etched across her eyebrows, wondering why I was crying so much, while my sister quietly laughed at my unexpected outburst over just words on a piece of paper. But it was much more than that. 

Here’s a short snippet from the letter she wrote to me:

“I can’t promise you that college won’t be tough at times. It will be, and frankly, it should be. There are going to be times when your ground feels shaky and you just want to run away. But there will also be a point when you realise that you can stand on your own, even though it feels like everything is falling apart. Like when you realised you can counter your opponent’s smashes in a match. So, my advice to you, not as a writer, but as your friend, is to just take a deep breath. Just keep swimming :) “

This letter, unlike the others, was an ode to our friendship and felt like a warm hug. Her words carried gentle reassurance and provided me with a much-needed boost of confidence before I started college.

Handwritten letters inadvertently end up capturing a moment in the past. Everything from our style of writing to our emotional state of mind is preserved through words frozen in time. It is almost as if they were a mini time capsule wrapped in paper. They lie there, undistorted and completely unedited, giving us an accurate depiction of our past selves. Letters often reveal subtle emotions that are brought to life through writing, but oftentimes, this sense of vulnerability is hidden by a digital screen and the rhythmic clacking of a keyboard. 

As the digital world takes precedence in our daily lives, text messages and digitalized words begin to feel robotic. Messages are evenly spaced and refined through hidden edits. They lack the small imperfections of being human, replaced instead by universalized emojis that simplify the complexity of emotion. We live in a world where unrehearsed and unedited thoughts are trivialized as opposed to carefully crafted text messages. Somewhere amidst the world of WhatsApp and instant DMs, we learned to communicate effectively, but not tenderly. In doing so, we forgot the slowness that comes with penning down thoughts into tangible words and the quality of devoting time and attention to writing things down by hand.

Handwritten letters are not just read; they are kept and cherished. They lie silently, somewhere between pages in a book, folded into a diary, stuck on fridge walls, pressed under a pillow, with a promise of revisiting them during moments when we feel a little too nostalgic. We write messages that vanish over time, forgotten within mere seconds, lost in the long digital chain of texts, and eventually deleted as if the conversation ceased to exist. We don’t reread texts from 2020, but we keep letters for decades.