I believe in letters – the kind that rest in your open hands, tangible and fragile, that start with something like “Dear” and end with something like “Sincerely” or “Yours truly” or “Love.”

Words have a certain power when they are written just for you – when each pen stroke or clack of keyboard is meant for one person, and one person only. They are conversations and laughter and sadness. They are anger and confessions and connections. And sometimes they can last forever.

They can be heartbreaking (“Dear Miss Rachel Branson, How are you? I hope that you are doing very well. I thank you for letting me be a part of your family. I am very happy. The subject that I like the best is math because I know how to count and nobody can fraud me in the store. I want to ask, do you study? Which career? I ask you to pray for my studies and for the prices of the food not to be so expensive. With very much love, Josevil”) or beautiful (“Life is more than fine. Life is spectacular. Perhaps I'm just so used to living this magnificent life that my eyes have blocked out the beauty of it. I get to walk through the grass everyday, no matter what color it is. I am surrounded by people at nearly every moment. People with stories and issues and habits and failures and rescues. People who are exactly like me.”) or funny (“I've been attacked by bears, pet little deer, and almost had my hand eaten by a duck. Bear world was great – better than the joke I thought it was going to be.”).

And inside my room, and under my desk, and in a torn up shoebox that says “Beaver Creek” on the outside, there all my letters lay, a rubber band wrapped tightly around some of them, others still in their original envelopes, some visiting me from the Dominican Republic, New Zealand, India, Austria, Wyoming, Overland Park. There they all sit, day after day, until I remember them – my dear friends. I will pull them out and shuffle through them and remember the places I've been, the friends I've lost and the friends I've won, and snapshots of my life that could never be captured with a camera or a song or a brush – only by words.

It's a funny thing to care about – letters. Who ever thought that something so mundane could be so extraordinary?