The Lost Art of Love Letters
By Peter KrayI left Jackson Hole on Valentine’s Day of 1993, leaving a pale blue Ford F-150 with a frozen engine that was smeared with oil, my worn brown futon, my other pair of skis (the slaloms) and a non-stop parade of deep winter storms that seemed to connect the clouds to the slopes with a thick white web of endlessly falling snow.
I was reluctant to leave all that powder, but there was a red-haired girl waiting in Denver with green eyes that glowed with the secrets of another world. She burned through my mind like a prairie fire, too hot anymore for the winter to ever hope to cool.
In the letter I said, “There’s only coffee inside me now, and the empty memory of you.”
I wrote that part in my mind, standing on Jackson’s red 8:30 employee tram on a January morning, trying not to move so the cold could come through. And then on the white paper with my pen, I told her how I thought of her soft skin warm beneath the covers as I watched the mountain unfold.
The afternoon became alpenglow. There were nights when the winter stars outside my window felt closer than the distance that letter had to travel to her door, “like the heat of hearts separated by snow.”
It was a bluebird day when she wrote me back, so the windows and the ice all burned like gold. She said she wanted to trace the sun on my face with her fingers, “and the wind and the night as well.”
Sandro, the young Republican kept handing Bloody Marys back through a little space in the luggage from the front of the car. He was a friend of my high school friend, Chris, who was at the wheel. They were young Republicans together, working for President George Bush the 1st on a new global order. They had driven up on a ski holiday in an Audi that they stuffed with my gear until it almost couldn’t be driven for the return.
My truck shit the bed the day before. And when the blue-eyed boys picked me up it soon became apparent that Toby the Dog, my guitar and only one pair of skis (the giant slaloms) would be able to go.
Toby rode on my lap for nine hours. A Labrador-Malamute mix with the white bib and black coat like a K-Mart parka, Chris said he pissed on the seat (and he probably did, being a left-wing radical mutt from Montana). We watched the white-capped peaks shrinking into fences around open fields of antelope and snow and every now and then I would hand my empty cup through the space in the luggage before Sandro’s hand with a star-spangled elephant watch on the wrist would pass it back full.
“Just one more kiss,” I wrote that girl. “Like a slow swirl of tattoos.”
I told her how a hot shower can feel like July at noon. And she wrote back, “I have a surprise for you.”
We had hardly heard about the Internet yet. Cable TV was a luxury only rich people owned. I couldn’t even afford a long-distance call. So I wrote words instead. I put my feelings into an envelope and sent them like a kiss on the wind across rivers and mountains in search of her, from my hand to her hand on a journey I couldn’t make on my own.
People hardly even send Hallmark Greetings now. For the holidays I got photo-shopped pictures and mother love form letters that read like grocery-list-pop-art poems. I can’t remember the last time I got a postcard. Instead I get 200 e-mails a day, and over half of them from people that I will never get to meet or know (like Wanda@Viagra, and Honey@Cialis, and HotMom@bedroomcamvideo).
There’s no tangible proof of e-mail. No drawer or frame or notebook that holds a few folded, precious few. I delete them like taking out the papers. And when I turn my computer off, it’s like they never existed at all.
I think it’s one more reason people don’t take enough time for each other anymore. Things have to happen so fast that we don’t stop to talk or maybe even touch. Not even lovers. We just want to get right to naked. We say actions speak louder (and feel better) than words.
But I’ve always written for me as well. It made me feel good to tell her how good she made me feel; my Bare Naked Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Drunkest Nights when I sat out beneath the cold clearness of Orion and his gang of sparkling stars. Nothing burns like love letters; hearts on paper; words on skin. I imagine every one of us keeps a stack of them, up in the closet like an unfinished novel.
It’s why I like to travel now. I like to sit on planes out of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, Salt Lake City and Denver, levitating over the white folded mountains never far below. I drive past San Antonio Mountain, into the woods and dark when the elk and deer are on the road.
There is something inevitable about the way she keeps pulling me home. Our bodies seem to always find each other, as if the entire universe would never be any bigger than the distance between me and her. It turns me on to have her open the door with those green eyes as wet and wild as twin planets unexplored, and to walk into the welcoming light of our house, as safe and secret as the mail. MG
