In sending something, you don’t just send it to the other person—you also send it away from yourself. This is especially true of handwritten correspondence through the mail. Unless you take a picture of it beforehand (do you guys do this? I have once or twice maybe), when you send it, it’s really gone. It feels gone. I’ve sent more letters than I can count that I haven’t gotten responses to.
What did I write again? Did I say the right thing? Was I talking nonsense? No way to check, unless you follow up with a phone call or somesuch. With the “coming of age” of literacy in 1874 with advent of the European postal service, as Vincent argues it, more people than ever were able to experience this particular feeling. “Second-Guessing the Mail Syndrome (SGMS),” maybe, but perhaps other people don’t experience the same kind of self-doubt that I do about what I’ve written, and whether it will still be effective once it’s gotten where it’s going.
I once dreamed about some sort of Mail Monster. It lived in Vermont, because that’s where I was when I dreamed this. It shredded letters, willfully entrusted to the country-road mailbox, from daughters to mothers and lovers to lovers and all other combinations of senders and recipients. The letters were never received, and the would-be recipients thought the senders didn’t care about them, while the foiled senders held out a hopeless hope that they had been read and understood when in fact their writing was never received. A nightmare of solipsism, in the style of a German fairytale.
Another postal anxiety I have is that somehow my written words will be different when they arrive in the recipient’s hands. That they’ll somehow have been scrambled, mutated, or possessed somewhere in the handling process, and end up saying something quite different from what I intended.
Today, I wrote and sent a belated get-well card to a friend who dealt with ovarian cancer this past year. I am hoping it gets there, and that everything I wrote will still mean what I meant it to mean. Perhaps what I’m musing on here in this post is the middlemen, the handling, the trust that we place in the postal service to do right by our correspondences. I’m sending my writing away from me, and I can’t check up on it anymore, unless I find my card on the mantle of the house I sent it to, startlingly familiar, when I am next there.
