There’s something I keep coming back to: the way a letter interrupts time.
Not in a dramatic sense. Not like news or urgency. More like a soft pause inserted into someone else’s day. A letter asks nothing of you in the moment it is written. It simply travels. It waits. And then, at some unpredictable hour, it arrives and changes the shape of whatever the reader was doing.
I think that’s what I’ve always loved about correspondence—not its nostalgia, but its slowness. Its refusal to behave like most forms of communication we now rely on. A letter doesn’t demand immediacy. It doesn’t try to win attention. It simply offers itself, fully formed, to someone who may or may not be ready for it.
In that space—between sending and receiving—something interesting happens. Imagination fills in the gaps. A life begins to exist on both sides of the page.
This is part of what led me to begin a letter-based practice alongside my other writing. Not as a replacement for books or poems, but as a different kind of attention. A way of writing that is more porous, more relational. Less about finishing something, more about staying in conversation with it.
The letters themselves are not strictly factual. They move between lived experience and fiction, between memory and invention. They include fragments of gossip, observations from daily life, and imagined encounters—especially between men, and especially in the quieter emotional registers that don’t always find space elsewhere. What matters most to me is not whether each detail is “true,” but whether it feels alive enough to be believed in the moment it is read.
There’s a kind of intimacy that forms in that ambiguity. Not performance, exactly. More like proximity. As if the reader and writer are sharing a room that neither fully controls.
I’ve been thinking about connection in general—how fragile it is, how easily it dissolves into noise. Most modern communication is designed for speed, clarity, resolution. But human connection is rarely any of those things. It’s delayed. It misfires. It returns unexpectedly. It lingers long after the conversation has ended.
A letter resists the pressure to resolve anything. It simply continues the thread.
That is the spirit behind what I’ve begun sharing through Substack. It is a place to hold these letters—not as content, but as correspondence. A kind of ongoing exchange that unfolds slowly, one envelope at a time. Over time, I hope it becomes something that feels less like a publication and more like a shared habit of attention between writer and reader.
There is a quiet joy in that kind of structure. Knowing that somewhere, someone will open a message that was not written for everyone, but still manages to find them anyway.
And perhaps that is the real reason I keep returning to letters: they make strangers into correspondents. Not instantly, not superficially—but gradually, through repetition, through care, through time.
That feels like enough reason to keep writing them.