In 1999 I met a girl at the seaside. We struck up a friendship, but it didn’t last long, literally a couple of days: her family was leaving the resort much earlier than mine. She lived in another city, and since neither the internet nor texting had been invented yet (I mean they hadn’t been invented in Ukraine), the only way to communicate was paper mail.
By the way, I have a very good relationship with regular mail; back then it wasn’t hard for me at all to write her letters once a week, or to other friends. I even taught one friend to play guitar by paper mail. And I still send postcards from every city I visit.
And we started writing to each other. A few months later we had a misunderstanding, and I stopped answering her letters. That was the end of the epistolary romance.
Fast-forward to 2010. Mobile phones, some people had two, the internet, HDTV, the hryvnia at eight to the dollar, Yanukovych had just become president. I had acquired social networks and was looking for classmates, university groupmates, and other acquaintances. I also remembered that old correspondence. Finding the girl by first and last name wasn’t difficult. I sat up all night and reread all the letters from that distant ’99. And I wrote her a reply to those unanswered letters 11 years later.
Of course, no friendship came of it anymore. A person at 15 and a person at 26 are two different people. But the deed was done: the correspondence got its logical ending.
But it’s better to answer on time.