The Letter Girl (Part 1)

Alyson liked letters. Well, more accurately, Alyson loved letters. She loved the transfer of ink to the page–how the purples, blues and blacks clung to the thin sheet as burrs to a cat’s fur. She loved the smell; the intoxicating papery scent that lit up her brain and lingered, always managing to deliver a smile to her face. She loved the feeling, too, under her fingertips, with its smooth but snagging surface.

She’d always loved them, since the time she was taught what they were in the first grade. She remembered how she’d thought of them at gifts, then, as a surprise to be opened and poured over and pinned on a wall. She had used to write long letters to herself and send them to her own address, just for the excitement of giving and receiving them. Her parents were fine with paying for the stamps and paper back then, since they had thought it was just a short, and adorable, stage of childhood. But as she grew up, she never grew out of it–instead it became stronger and so much a part of her identity, that her nickname had become “Letter Girl.”

Tonight Letter Girl sat at her lamp-lit desk and slowly penned a lengthy letter to her grandmother. She wrote as neatly and elegantly as usual, with embellished first letters and curvy lines. Her way of writing was her art–she expressed herself as much in the way each stroke was dragged along the page as the words that the strokes read off as.

For this letter she used her buttery yellow paper, which seemed to glow even in the dark room. By now she had many varieties of paper, collected every time she had the money and time to buy more from the local stationary store. Her pens, too, were special, and she had a great number of them as well. There were pens for mean letters, kind letters, and what’s-up letters. There were ones for birthday letters and get-well cards, and ones for Christmas and thank-you letters. Any other person would see no difference in the way the pen’s ink looked on the page, but for Letter Girl the pen was always essential. If it wasn’t the right pen, she’d sit there staring at the blank page with her mind in turmoil about the absolute wrongness of the moment.

She signed off at the bottom with a deliberately crafted flourish, not writing her given name, Alyson, but what she was called–Letter Girl. She would forever be Letter Girl in her own mind.

Sliding the card into the envelope and a licking the seal, she took out the pen used for writing addresses and wrote out the easily memorized words. For all she lacked in wisdom at school, she made up with her uncanny ability to memorize names and addresses. There were thousands of kids at school, but if you were to hold up a picture of any one of them, she would’ve been able to tell you both their full name and where they lived. She’d written a letter at least once to all of them, including the ones she didn’t like. Letters were just in her nature–in her lungs as the air she breathed–and her school was the easiest place to gather people to write to.

Her pen died with the number “5” at the end of the area code and she paused. Lifting the letter up, she laid it gently down at the desk and tightened her grip on the pen. Bowing her head for a moment of silence, she thought of all the envelopes that had been kissed by its tip, and how many places its ink had gone. This pen had delivered all sorts of letters to all sorts of towns and cities and middles-of-nowheres, and now it had give out its last breath, birthed its last baby, and was ready to rest in peace.

Tearing a precisely measured piece of tape from her tape dispenser, she taped it up on the wall with all the other pens that had died. Some were as old as ten years, and some as young as one year, but they covered the wall like the scales of a fish, and a small sticker was placed beneath each one with day bought and day died. The stickers were more for show, and as a precaution, since Letter Girl knew every single one by heart–even the old ones, when her mind had been less accustomed to memorizing numbers and letters.

Walking back to her desk, she centered the letter under the light and resolved to bring it to the post office tomorrow. Good thing today was a Friday, since it meant she could leave early in the morning.

Flicking the light off and taking a few blind steps, she dropped into bed and dreamed of the travel of the letter; its journey through hands and skies and mysterious bags with other fellow travelers of the day and night. How she wished she could be a letter herself, with such a life of adventure and certainly, and the knowledge that her arrival would bring around change, in comparison to the general nobody she was. If she could only meet the right person, a person who understood her. A person who got the pens on the walls, and the special paper, and the freedom she felt in the sealing of an envelope. The day you meet them will be tomorrow, she told herself every night when she went to bed. It will always be tomorrow. And she was right; along with the autumn leaves falling to the ground, and the dew sliding down the tips of grass, the person came the next day in the form of what she knew best–a letter.