Handwritten

Ever since moving out here Joshua and I have talked a lot about friends and how to keep in touch. It is really hard, a 3 hour time difference really works against us as does needing to relax when we walk in the door not instantly be on the phone.
But I finally think we are getting better at it. Joshua plays minecraft with some of his best friends and they talk the whole time they play and it's a really creative fun way to keep in touch.
For me I've found that when I don't have time for the phone I love sending letters and postcards. Sometimes I just thought of that friend that day and want them to know I'm thinking of them and sometimes I write whole letters or make and send cards. The phone isn't always an option but I don't want them to think I don't have time for them in my life so snail mail is the way I try to do that.

all of the letters/cards/postcards our friends and family have sent us since we've been out here

I have a friend Lauren though who I've known since freshmen year of high school. She stayed at my house one weekend for a student council conference my school was hosting and we've kept in touch ever since. We wrote each other elaborate letters full of stickers and drawings and photos to secrets, pain, and goofy stuff. She snuck out and drove hours with her friend to visit me one weekend in high school and we both went to UC together for a little bit. Then in the middle of college we lost touch a bit. But when I packing and sorting the stuff at my parent's house to move out to Seattle I found a giant stack of her letters and lo and behold that same month she had found mine too. She sent me a letter and we picked it right back up.

She has been an amazing friend from afar. She has never judged me but instead encouraged me, let me whine, listened to boring relationship problems and made me laugh when I really needed it. Her letters seem to come at the exact right time. They are always colorful and at the bottom she always leaves a line to the postperson telling them to have a good day.
I wish she was closer, I wish we could have lunch, but I really think this beautiful relationship we still have and have been able to carry on through letters is what made me ever think to send mail to my friends in the first place.

I really hope everyone has a Lauren and I hope I'm as good back to her as she is to me.
And I will always be grateful for her teaching me how amazing and powerful a handwritten letter from the heart can be!

some of Lauren's letters (well the covers of them)