Intercontinental Pen Pal
- happy birthday my dahl loving friend
I have a pen-pal and I haven’t heard from him in a while.
Lets call him “M” (for privacy purposes).
I have his phone number, but we made a promise to eachother two letters back that they were just there in case of an emergency. Something along the lines of “Hey M, i’ve decided to pack up my life and move to San Diego can I crash on your couch?” or “Maya just thought i’d drop you a message to show you this really cool bird we’re working with!” or “It’s your birthday so i’m writing to you publically on Substack!”.
None of those eventualities have come into fruition YET. I am instead waiting for a message from my Mother informing me that another US-stamped letter has arrived at her door.
The deal is we send letters to our family homes, we both move around a fair amount and it just makes sense for our letters to have a home base. But now i’m waitng for a letter back and i’m confronted with the question of if I can triple letter? I never otherthink a triple text but something feels intimate about this, the thought of letters stacking up at his moms house, unopened, gives me crippling anxiety. He managed to get me a card in time for my birthday, I haven’t mirrored the sentiment, instead I sent a 3 page letter of nonsense and a postcard from Paris.
If I know anything about Mr M the gesture will still be appreciated.
I find myself re-reading his letters often, they always seem to make me quite emotional. They give me a tiny slice of familiarity whilst trying to place him in the time and space he writes about, the Buddhist temple visible from his window, the aisles of Trader Joe’s as he picks out a card for me. Each detail is a breadcrumb leading me back to that lovely person I met for 4 brief days in a hostel.
I recognise how romantic this all sounds but I would like to stress that alought, yes, I dumbfoundedly adore “M” this is not a romantic love story about meeting your forever lover across the world. But instead a forever friend. And isn’t that beautiful.
I didn’t expect to check in a lovely curly haired Californian to the hostel I worked at, but 4 days before my flight home he bundled in. Smiley and tired and ready for bed.
Some may say I charmed him, he would say I forced him, to stay awake and come to my last Jungle Rave with the hostel and the rest was history.
Neither of us could go to the shops without the other, had to eat breakfast at the same time, reserved hammocks for one and other, and filled up water for eachother when the sun was at its peak and we hid in the shade of the “games room”. I found myself telling him thoughts that I rarely said outloud, as we offered eachother advice about lost loves and our mutual fear of losing sight of ourselves. We connected so wonderfully as I regaled him with stories of London life and he tried to squash my reservations about Americans or America in general.
One night he sat and watched me make dahl in the communal kitchen, I dont know if i’m remembering wrong but I feel like notes were taken. Or maybe he was just so effortlessly interested in every step that it felt like he was noting it all down. (Let me know if you need the recipe M). The next day he had postcards to send back home, and told me he had a spare one going. I told him to send me one, reciting my mums address in its comfortable second nature, he wrote it down.
My postcard arrived 2 weeks after I had made it home, I’d moved back to East London by that point and my mum sent me a picture of the back of a postcard, she simply wrote “I love [insert M’s full name here]”. The content of the postcard was silly and littered with nuts inside jokes that had formed over roughly 96hours, and it was the best postcard i’ve ever recieved - sorry to anyone else who has sent me one.
He wrote his return address in the first line and I wrote back.
So M,
I don’t know if another letter of mine has reached your moms doorstep, or if you’re sitting somewhere in California rereading my last one the way I reread yours. Where do you keep them? Maybe that’s the beauty of it; the space between us isn’t emptiness, it’s all the things we’ve managed to fill it with, all the little anecdotes and advice.
Anywho - as I write this it’s your birthday. So, when you see this, Happy Birthday!
Thank you for being a confidant across the pond. May we continue to write, continue to wait and continue to wonder. You are a wonderful friend regardless of how far away, you deserve the world. Live quietly and love loudly x