Paper Chase

Nicole and I play card tag. One of us writes a greeting card and sends it to the other, who promptly (most of the time) replies with another card. It’s one of my greatest pleasures to spend a lunch break sipping ridiculously expensive tea and composing a literary snapshot to my propinquitous (?) poet. Equally joyful is finding an envelope bearing my address in her flashy handwriting when I get home from work. Neither of us has any trouble finding blank cards with cool motifs, but in the event when a “real” letter is warranted, I, at least, am pretty well hooped.

I spent two days last week on the hunt for writing paper. Nothing special; just a pad of six-by-nine in a pretty colour with matching envelopes. I hit office supply stores, art supply shops, paper shops (yes, paper shops), and the downtown Hallmark store, and the closest thing I could find to what I wanted was a heavier-weight 8.5 by 11 in soft gold that was probably meant for laser printing or scrapbooking or drywalling because, short of special-ordering personalized stationery from a highfalutin print shop, ordinary paper for the purpose of handwritten correspondence is extinct in Victoria. An online search rendered similarly dismal results. Nobody stocks quality writing paper anymore. What is a correspondence artist to do?

Well, this one settled for the gold leaf. It turned out to be appropriate, given that I was writing a rave review for Nic’s latest short story—a riveting epic rivaling any of mine for number of pages. The author deserved a “real” letter, written in my illegible scrawl as evidence of my enthusiastic response to her effort. Ink from a pen is more personal and heartfelt than ink blurped from a printer cartridge, even if the font on the latter is easier on the eyes than my cramped and crooked handwriting. The organic nature of putting pen to paper makes it a more meaningful act; love and praise and admiration flow from my heart to my hand through my pen and thus into the very fibres of the paper itself. I become part of the correspondence so when Nic receives it, she can feel my energy as it was when I expressed it. The same applies when I hear from her—before my brain even interprets them, I can tell whether she was bubbly as champagne or flat as old ginger ale by the slant and size of her handwritten characters. Knowing that she handled the paper before sending it on its way brings her a little bit closer, too. Though she is undeniably Nicole when presented in Arial font, I just don’t get the same warmth from an email.

Whining aside, I did find a pad of strawberry-ice-cream-pink notepaper that would have suited perfectly, had strawberry-ice-cream-pink envelopes been available. They weren’t, so I perused the loose paper section in hope of a match among the errant envelopes. Colour, yes; size, no. &$%#.

I bought the paper anyway. It might be worth something someday.