* enashtrin *

Piece of My Heart

• Posted by enashtrin on February 2nd, 2007 filed in mixed up

Piece of My Heart

The letters I’ve saved remind me of all the times I’ve been loved.

By Melanie Rehak

In June of 1985, I fell in love for the first time. It was at camp, and though I was only 14, I was already far too practical to believe that our rapture would survive the long winter (not to mention the distance between New York City and Toronto). So we said our farewells and swore to write. We were miserable, but the thought of receiving love letters was almost as good as the furtive kissing before lights-out had been. It seemed so adult, so clandestine—so much better than the dirty sweatshirt he had given me to remember him by.

But despite our professions of undying love in person, when it came to writing, we were amateurs. We often discussed our French homework, and in one note he mentioned feeling guilty for sending me gum as a token of his affection. Apparently I had confided in him that I had just returned from the dentist with four cavities—not exactly the stuff of thwarted passion. As time passed, though, we warmed to the tragic dimensions of our separation. “How about you? Are you the same girl I knew and loved?” he wrote with sweet desperation on a sheet of pale green paper. “The girl from New York City with high-tops and crazy earrings? Please write back.”

I was that girl, and she would have been lost forever if I hadn’t kept his letters. I rarely look at them, but I know they’re there, a record of my emotional education and an insurance policy against forgetting. Whenever I get unsettled, I can look back and see just how I got here, and then move forward.

I store them in a big box along with missives from college boyfriends (requisite bad poetry included), convoluted mash notes from the equally convoluted romances of my early 20s and one mind-boggling confession from a fellow graduate student who decided, inexplicably, to tell me that he was in love with me but planned to keep it a secret from then on. Each one of them marks a moment of my evolution from the 14-year-old with high-tops to the wife and mother I am now.

 

Also in my collection are dozens of letters and cards from my last boyfriend, the one who became my husband. Included is a stack of single pages with nothing but enormous numbers on them. He faxed these to me at work whenever we were getting close to a weekend visit (we lived in different states, and e-mail was not yet popular). Each number stood for the hours left until we would be together, and I thrilled to every single one.

Seeing those numerical declarations of desire now, so bold and clear, literally in black and white, I remember vividly what it was like to receive them, how wanted and loved I felt and how ferociously I loved him back. These are good moments to recall, now that we sleep in the same bed every night, do each other’s laundry and argue over who will go home to relieve the babysitter. Every marriage needs to be stripped down to its essence once in a while in order to be renewed, and love letters can do the job in an instant. Even when they’re old, they’re powerful enough to make the rest of the world fall away, however briefly.

This was something my husband intuited from our earliest days together. In the very first letter he wrote to me after we met, he pondered our new situation: “I still can’t figure out what it is that I like most about talking with you…the laughing, the honesty, the freshness of becoming acquainted with each other’s stories. If we could hold on to all of this, then nothing would ever have the chance to become too familiar, old, worn out.”

He then made sure we could do just that, by preserving our courtship on paper. “When I said good-bye to you,” he wrote just before our first anniversary, “I realized something that I think I’ve realized for a long time now but was none-theless moved to realize again: I love you in a way I’ve loved no one else.” Reading this again, nine years later, I realize it too.

 

But love letters are not just for couples. I send valentines to at least half a dozen people on February 14, not only to my husband (who, truth be told, doesn’t care for officially dictated days of love anyway). I never miss a chance to write a thank-you note—which is really just another excuse to tell someone how much you love that he or she knows you well enough to pick the perfect gift—and I often choose to write a faraway friend a letter instead of an e-mail, because I suspect that everyone I know is just as excited as I am to find a handwritten surprise in the mail, even in the 21st century.

I learned to do these things from the other person whose love letters I’ve been carrying around with me for decades: my father. He was a man who never took a trip without sending a card to say he missed me. Once I left home, he displayed an enviable gift for dropping a well-timed note in the mail, always handwritten in his almost illegible scrawl, whenever I was feeling uncertain about some choice I’d made or what to do next. He could be encouraging in a mere two sentences, one of which was frequently “Be yourself,” and he was not afraid to sign a card or a letter, “With love and admiration.” Often he wrote just to say how much he had enjoyed seeing me.

These letters aren’t boxed with all of my other ones. Somehow I got into the habit of stashing them in between books in my first apartment as they arrived. Every time I move, I replace each one among my best-loved titles, where I come across them as I reach for a favorite novel or book of poems. They’re all around me, and unlike romantic letters, they remind me not of any specific time but, rather, that at all times in my life, I have been loved. My father passed away last summer, but when I reread his letters, I hear his voice and feel that he isn’t really so far from me after all.

Which is just one more argument for storing those dusty envelopes and tattered pieces of paper close at hand. Anything that brings back people we’ve lost is worth holding on to. Anything that makes you more sure of who you are is worth keeping forever. And, as that long-ago boyfriend implored—please write back.