Ahhhh the good ol’ days… I grew up in the 80s. Was in my 20s in the 90s. It doesn’t seem that long ago. Gosh, my mom was my age in the 90s. Now my mom is gone. It’s gone so fast. Some time ago I was watching some stuff on youtube. Thought I’d check out Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” video. The lyrics... I was right there again. The song is about writing letters. Waiting to get letters.
“I used to write
I used to write letters
I used to sign my name…"
It seems strange
How we used to wait for letters to arrive
But what’s stranger still is how something so small can keep you alive…”
Wow. Yes. I’ve been there.
In the late 80s and into the 90s I had many pen-pals. I loved to write and communicate with people from around the world. Most of my pen-pals were in the US, and a few became good friends. I had no close friends here at home. Certainly no one that shared the same interests. I was always an outcast here. I was the only goth in my small high school. No one knew the Cure but me. And that made me weird. My pen-pals knew the Cure. It was kind of an underground thing - communicating with these people. We kind of had our own culture. We would share our latest music. My stereo was always busy making copies onto cassettes of my latest tapes and CDs. It was a good way to get free music. We would make copies of magazine articles about our favorite bands or other things. My parents actually bought me for Christmas one year a small copier because I was always sending mom to the post office with stuff to copy for me, and it cost 25 cents a page. This was a lot better for all of us. So we would pack our packages full to the brim with tapes and articles along with our letters. It was exciting!! One of my pen-pals became a close friend. We would take turns calling weekly, and finally in 1993 she got to visit and stay a week. Again in 1996. It was a good time.
I even fell in love by mail. One of my pen-pals stole my heart. Unfortunately, he didn’t think the same about me. I would write him and then wait longingly for a letter back from him. And he kept me waiting - and waiting - and waiting… I think once it was three months before I heard back from him. It drove me crazy. I would wonder what was taking him so long. I knew he was in college - but still…. Finally he just asked me if I thought we should continue writing each other because he felt we weren’t connecting. Well why not?? We talked about things okay. I didn’t see how we weren’t. I think he just meant he didn’t really like me and wanted to stop writing. I didn’t want to hear it or accept it. And he did stop writing shortly after that. I wrote a few other guys, but I didn’t feel for them like I did him. There was one guy in England who made good mix tapes, but he always seemed to write only when he didn’t have a girlfriend. That got annoying.
Waiting. I did a lot of it then. I had plenty of pen-pals to keep me busy, but there were those certain ones that you did just connect with. A very few I could write pages and pages to. The one who visited - it got to where I was writing letters to her over 100 pages long like once a month. She was writing back with full one-subject notebooks. It got to a point where we had to shorten things. I wonder where my letters are now. I lost hers in the fire we had 9 years ago.
Times change. People change. Letters gradually stopped coming in as people carried on with their lives and got older. Strangely it always seemed it was the pen-pals I had who stopped writing me rather than me stopping writing them. I had a strange life. A life in suspension at the time, whereas others were falling in love, going to school, marrying and having kids. I had quit college and was floundering around at home. I had all the time in the world. So these people eventually disappeared from my life. A few have found me on facebook and tried to reenter my life, but things haven’t really worked out. People do change and times do change and maybe it’s me who is now the busy one. Life is weird.
Yes, we used to wait. We used to write. We used to sign our names.
“Til next time, your friend, Andrea”
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