Love on the Data Highway

.Cent, Issue 07

In a time of modern technology and instant messaging, the idea of writing and posting a letter, instead of emailing or texting, may to some, appear redundant. Technology may mean that we can contact someone across the world, sharing words within a few moments, however, do these messages make our past disposable and instead of having correspondence to look back on in times to come, is it possible that any trace of communication will have been deleted? For me, it is more important than ever now to celebrate the traditional act of letter writing so, in one of our .Cent meetings discussing this issue, I suggested the idea of love letters, in particular those of Virginia Woolf. I am not a very technical person, and so maybe this is why, for me, handwritten letters are not only romantic but are the ultimate form of communication – and the idea of a creative, such as Virginia Woolf, corresponding through handwritten letters to her friends and lovers and us now being able to read these letters, eighty years later amazes me. In an issue dedicated to ‘reach out and touch’ it seemed only right that we dedicate space to some of these letters and that I share some of my own story.

I met my husband Casey in a tiny club called Timepiece in Devon. He was surrounded by friends who were attempting to break dance and I watched him from the corner with my one pound can of Red Stripe trying to convince myself to approach him. Within one week we had had our first date and I received my first love letter from him. That was six years ago – I now have collected dozens and dozens of letters, some type written on squared paper, some handwritten on airmail sheets; all of which are meticulously tied up with string, labelled in order and stored in a cupboard.

The act of letter writing has always been a necessary tool for us – within six months of our meeting, Casey moved away to study for his M.A, then I travelled abroad for months at a time and so it was only one year ago that we finally moved in together. In the times whilst we were apart, handwritten love letters acted as a comfort to one another, a tool to convey our thoughts and share small but significant facts about our daily routines, trying to keep our lives as close as possible, even though we were hundreds of miles apart.
The arrival of letters from Casey diminished during some periods of my travel and so I started to create an archive of his emails to me. In the times when we were constantly travelling I had no fixed address for him to send mail, however, there was always an internet café, even within the tiniest of villages, where I could check and save my emails. I would accumulate ten or so emails and then print them out, tie them carefully together and hide them in a notebook at the bottom of my rucksack until the time came to add to them again. The act of stowing them at the bottom of my bag was of great significance as the emails were so precious to me, and the continuous packing and unpacking of travelling meant that unless I was careful they could be easily lost.

In addition to these letters and emails, I saved and am still saving, another form of written communication from him; text messages. In a way these texts are tiny, condensed letters. The act of writing down his text messages means the day-to-day activities, events and emotions we have shared have been preserved.
The nature of text messaging, like emails, is to read and delete, however, by carefully noting down each message, they change form from being disposable words in technology into actual words in an actual notebook and can serve, like a traditional letter, as a record of our shared history. I recently found a telegram that my grandpa sent my grandma sixty years ago. He sent it for her twenty fifth birthday from overseas during the war. The text, stuck onto the telegram in strips to create the message resembles how I would imagine an early form of text message to be, with the numbered, ready made phrases such as ‘(30) Darling.’ reminding me of the prepared template messages programmed into technology. The fact that this telegram has survived for so many years and can be re-read by me, two generations after it was created, assures me of the importance of saving correspondence.

The habit of typing up Casey’s texts has now developed into a necessary routine – once I have accumulated a good number of messages I carefully write down each one, making sure every letter, word, space and even spelling mistake (which can be frequent, due to predictive text) is copied exactly as it appeared in the text. The messages vary from the planning of a weekend away; ‘08.08.2002 12.02pm okay six o’clock it is my wee chestnut. bournemouth ce soir, Paris ce demain. je loves you. Casey’ to reminiscing about a trip once we are home; 08.09.2002 10.40am I love you. nice to remember our romance in bonne France. j’adore mademoiselle. love casey.’

In transcribing every single text message Casey has sent me over the past sixty six months I now have a collection of over two thousand and six hundred of them. The rituals that accompany the copying out and saving of every message is a testimony to the importance of creating a written history, so that it can serve as a record of times past and be saved, like the sepia telegram, for years to come.