When I was sixteen, I was in love with reading. Reading always inspired me to write — pen to paper — and writing always inspired me to love.
One autumn night, I discovered a website of 300 handwritten love letters. I had uncovered a treasure, one that I would cherish and return to for years to come.
As soon as I read the website’s “an explanation,” I was consumed. I scrolled slowly, line by line, through the tiny black words in monospace font in paragraphs so large I would otherwise have skimmed and skipped altogether.
The writer wanted to rediscover a certain kind of intimacy and connection in a society, according to her, that was lacking both. In simpler words, she wanted to train her heart to feel. Like, really feel.
And to feel, she decided to write 300 love letters.
Each letter was written with a goal to pull out and vocalize the small thread, the invisible string, connecting her to those around her.
Each letter was written to someone the writer knew, but was mailed at random to strangers across the country.
Each letter was handwritten by pen or marker or crayon on a range of media, one even on a piece of toilet paper, but was represented on the website’s user interface in a giant grid of tiny colored clickable squares.
Each letter was color coded corresponding to the type of relationship the writer had with each of the recipients: red and pink for lovers, yellow for strangers, blue for friends, indigo for family, purple for crushes, and so on and so on and so on.
That night, I read every letter.
I clicked through every single little square of every single color. I read every line, handwritten or typed, on every form of media.
Turns out there are actually 400 letters, not 300. She wrote an extra 100 letters because the first 300 left her unsatisfied: “it was only within the last hundred letters that I started really writing to strangers, acquaintances, family, it felt like I just started getting to the hard part.”
And then decided I, too, would write 400 handwritten love letters corresponding to the same exact color code.
I did blues and purples and greens (for acquaintances) and browns (for the people we don't really like) and whites (for ourselves). I did every color except for red and pink (for lovers) because I had only read of them, but had never known one — yet.
I was at the age where yellows (for strangers) delighted me most while indigoes (for family) challenged me most. There were more browns (for the people we don't really like) than whites (for ourselves) and as many purples (for crushes) as greens (for acquaintances).
Six months into her own 400 letter project, sixteen-year-old me felt she had seen it all. She knew, or at least thought she knew, what it meant to feel. And feeling, like really feeling, emboldened her with a sense of comfort and connection she hadn't known before — a confidence that compelled her to stop sending her purples to strangers and instead try sending one to its intended recipient.
“Hi," popped up on her phone a week later.
Alone, those two figures, H and I, contain little meaning, if any. But on that Friday afternoon, they contained the known and the unknown and every emotion in between.