Letters.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Byline: Gabriella S. Martelino

WHENEVER I feel the need to go down memory lane, I open a box tucked in the corner of my room. This box, with slightly curled corners and a dusty painted top, documents my middle-school years through letters.

There are letters hidden within envelopes, notes with hasty scribbles, index cards with uniform block letters, and torn notebook paper filled from top to bottom with glittery ink. They all vie for my attention. They are alive, their letters jumping and screaming, with all the exuberance of a fifth grader. They tell brief tales of puppy love and the consequent courtship, of break-ups and make-ups, of unnecessarily cruel teachers and even worse, parents. They tell stories that could have been told over lunch break or even in the corridors between classes. Instead they were written down, eternally preserved in a worn shoe box.

In the summer of 1998, I vacationed at my grandmother's home in San Bruno, California. During my first jet-lagged week, I wrote lengthy e-mails to a friend back home. I was at an appalling stage where I felt the need to clip every word to make it sound like slang: "Went to da mall yezterday and bought the coolezt outfit." "It supah rocked!"

She replied in kind and some of my best moments that vacation were spent in front of the computer, laughing and typing away. Despite the thrill of finding a new message upon logging on, I desperately missed her kitschy sticker-filled letters and even contemplated asking her to rewrite all her e-mails on stationery to be given upon my return.

A similar feeling overwhelmed me when I read one of my father's e-mails a few years later. His choice of words and the rhythms of his sentences were so uniquely his, yet I missed the illegible scrawl that usually accompanied his long, thoughtful correspondence.