I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter...

Actually, I wrote one already, a tiny note to a friend of mine.
I saw beautiful stationery at the bookstore, looking as if someone might've colored it by hand. As my fingertips fluttered through the envelopes and notecards, I had the strangest dream, Mommy. I mean the strangest thought, and not The Strangest, but odd enough.

The mail doesn't track every letter from Which to Whom. You can omit a return address and sneak it into any lonely postbox. Your letter requires only a destination and a stamp that's harder to trace than a dollar bill. A letter has no wires to tap. Nothing's automatically duplicated or archived. A pen doesn't know what it wrote, and can't reveal the secrets it's transcribed. When a scribbled page is destroyed, it leaves no digital remainder. After thousands of years, putting characters to paper is still private and liberating. In 2005, writing a letter feels deliciously subversive.