An Obituary to the Handwritten Letter

Dear handwritten letter,

I decided to write you in a form of you for your obituary. To put this in simple terms, I am truly going to miss you. Every time you arrived at my door I became hopeful and so elevated, because I was able to read what hands made, not what hands typed. That I was able to feel the paper that touched another's hands, not the screen that so many others have stared at. The connection of a true handwritten letter like yourself connected friends more than any social media could have ever connected us.

But people say, this isn’t the past anymore. It is the fast paced hyperspeed present, the twenty-first century, and there is no time for you anymore. Now, without you, the world is screened by the screens of this world and mobile through our mobile phones. Without you, connection isn't referring to the connections between others but connections to wifi, and the internet, solely to try to reach for the connection we truly desire but cannot receive because, well, there is no you.

Without you, we cannot slow down. We speed through messages, speed through conversations, speed text speed type speed speak speed past our whole lives; unwilling to slow down, to sit, to write, to think, to connect the minds of our own rather than our phone.

Goodbye handwritten letter, and thank you for the connections you brought me before this century unplugged reality, and entered into a world of screens. Before we picked up our technology provoking lens and placed down the pens that once connected us all.

Yours truly,

Rachel