Love Letters

 

The first love letter I have from my husband wasn't actually written to me. It is a folded crumpled page that was passed back and forth between him and a friend in class, when he was in tenth grade and I was in ninth. In the note, Josh wrote that he liked me and "probably will for a long long time." He saved the note, and several years later, just after we started dating, we found it tucked away with his high school papers in a box in his closet.

We've exchanged many love letters over the last ten years. We were especially prolific the first few months after we began dating; initially, we lived six hundred miles apart while I was in Maryland and he was in Tennessee, and then we had fifteen thousand miles between us while he completed a seven week internship in Australia. Our phone bills during that time became outrageous, but we also traded lots of written correspondence. In addition to greeting cards, postcards, and handwritten notes, we sent each other dozens of text messages and lengthy emails, many of which were printed out and saved. 

We still write each other love letters almost every day. Mostly, they are in the form of emails reading, "I'll stop by the store" or "I made your favorite cookies" or "I put gas in the car for you" or "I remembered to bump Dexter to the top of the Netflix queue." These notes might lack elaborate emotional declarations, but they are the ones that tell the story of real, true love.