The following excerpts are from a short story published on the Guardian website in 2017:
When Kiran Sidhu rediscovered letters her aunt had written 20 years ago, she could picture her and hear her voice. The discovery transported her to a precious time in her family life in a way that a text or email never could.
“It is magical how words arranged in a particular order, immortalised in a letter, can make their way through your fingertips and travel through your veins until all you can feel is heart. Her words described moments in time, now lost in space, or wherever it is that cherished moments and departed souls go. My aunt and my mother had untimely deaths, but the letters I held in my hands cemented a time when they both walked the Earth.”
“Emails and texts act like the middleman between the author and recipient, technology even dictates your words by guessing them and filling them in for you. The pen, however, begs to be enslaved; it needs to belong to you. I would have never been able to enjoy my aunt’s flowery writing if she had sent an email, where all of her As and Ts would have looked the same. And I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the silly face she drew as she signed off every letter. A letter is an act of creation in a way an email can never be. When someone sends you a handwritten letter, you receive a part of who they are.”
“Handwritten letters are tangible works of art as unique as your fingerprints: like your DNA, your letters belong to you.”
Read the whole story here: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/dec/02/handwritten-letters-belong-to-you-like-your-dna
Photo: Kiran Sidhu with one of the letters she found in a battered hatbox. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian