Sealed with a kiss

STYLE, JANUARY 2002

SAY, WHEN LAST did you receive a love letter? I don’t mean one of those insinuating SMS messages with misspelt words and no capital letters that a low class of person likes to send from bars in the early hours of the morning. Nor do I mean one of those dreary e-mail messages that arrive on your work desk and are supposed to make you think “Oh, how thoughtful!” when really they are just three lines and one of those faces created by typing a certain sequence of punctuation marks.

No, I mean a genuine, old-fashioned, handwritten love letter, sealed in an envelope with your name written on the front. Remember how your heart raced and your hands trembled! Remember that feeling, very much like swooning, when you saw your name written by the hand – the very hand! –of the one you love? Ah, the giddy, almost disbelieving joy of holding the letter and knowing that this very paper had been held by your beloved, that this paper has been marked by the indelible scrawls and squiggles of his or her love for you. It is a real object, an object that has physically travelled from them to you, not a screen that at the touch of a button will become a balance sheet or a mailbox or a magazine column. It is a letter of love, and can be nothing else.

Of all the things I miss from an earlier age – telegrams, say, and drive-ins and dressing for dinner and doctors that make house calls – I think it is the demise of the love letter that most impoverishes our modern lives. My infatuation started early. When I was 12 Shelly Whitfield gave me a love letter. Actually Shelley Whitfield didn’t give it to me – she gave it to Joanna Thurley to give to me. Or was it Marge Golightly? I forget. But I have not forgotten that letter.

I carried it away, hot in the pocket of my school shirt, burning against my boyish breast, until I could open it behind the scoreboard on the cricket field. Shelley Whitfield must have borrowed her mother’s lipstick as well as raiding her stationery drawer, because the outside of the envelope was patterned with Shelley’s crimson lip-prints. I couldn’t breathe as I held it in my hand. For weeks – ah, who am I kidding? – for years to come I studied that envelope and those lip-prints, examining the pattern of folds and swirls and cracks and valleys immortalised in lipstick. I blushed at the scarlet intimacy. Today, if I close my eyes and sit quietly, I can still remember the mingled scent of lipstick and paper, and it makes the breath catch in my throat.

I wrote back to Shelley Whitfield as passionately as I could, although that lark of applying lip-prints in boot polish didn’t really have the desired results. Today, if I close my eyes and sit quietly, I can still taste school shoe. It ended of course, as all such passions must end. The differences were too great between us. She liked Bonnie Tyler and I liked Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Besides, I was too shy ever actually to speak to her. Whenever we bumped into each other at the bicycle racks of a morning and she said “Hello”, as she sometimes did, I would stammer and splutter and ring my bell to cover my confusion. Then I would snap her bra straps and run away. Did I but know it, that would not be the last relationship to end because of a lack of communication.

But that letter made an indelible impression on me. I cherish all the love letters I have ever sent or received. The love letter is erotic and poignant in a way that e-mails and telephone calls never can be. The love letter is about waiting and longing and delay, about calling up your beloved in your mind like a ghost. And that, really, is the best part, isn’t it? There is a ninth-century Arabic poem by the medieval Zarif Al-Washsa that sighs:

To love is to kiss, in your mind, a hand or arm
or to send letters whose spells are stronger than witchcraft.

Love is nothing but this; when lovers sleep together, love perishes.

I can’t say I encourage too fanatical an adherence to that last part, but Al-Washsa reminds us of a fine truth. I urge you: send a love letter to the one you love. Write it by hand. Send it today. Moisten the envelope flap with your tears of longing, or joy, or repentance. Bring some of the magic back. Write that letter.