In a Digital World, I Tried to Write My Love in the Analog

There is a special gesture in the analog, in putting love to paper, when everything is in code.

“We’ve known each other two weeks and four days. I counted,” I said, looking into his eyes with unease. I was leaving New York to go on a family vacation in Tokyo. I’d be away for the next two weeks. Our hands and knees were touching over the metal café table where we’d shared a sweet-savory gelato. “What’s going to happen?”

He looked back at me reassuringly. We promised to keep in touch during my trip.

I kept my voice even as I said, “Please don’t forget I exist.” I was surprised at my own ardor, a little abashed at the excitement of meeting someone I felt so strongly about, and afraid the momentum we’d built in three weeks would be undone in two. I tried to avoid doing the math on the half-life of attraction.

At 39,000 feet, I worried about being both spontaneous and measured in those promised texts. New York-Tokyo represented a day-night difference in time zones. Our regular texting pattern had been a sustained and pleasing volley, punctuated by dates that led to a spike in emotion, but not more frequent messaging. I had learned to reserve my thoughts and feelings to express in person, but that formula was disrupted by travel. I strategized, rationed my communication into a burst of light-hearted messages I sent each night, adding a picture or two. I imagined him waking to those messages with what I hoped was the small delight of being touched digitally.

In Tokyo, my parents and I explored as tourists, subject to all the expected marvels and at least a few accidental ones. At a scheduled pit stop, the Edo-Tokyo Museum, I saw in the gift shop a card in the shape of a fan. Its black striated background was inlaid with gold leaf; it had matte gold trim and a glossy wooden handle—irresistibly beautiful. The golden pavilion it depicted was a site we’d be visiting soon in Kyoto. I bought the card with a nervous, knowing feeling that I’d be reaching out to him in a more concrete form.

That night, I typed my words, then copied them with care on the back of the fan. A little prose poem, ending with a simple statement. I’m thinking of you. Proxy for—what? I miss you? Something like, I want you. I felt a thrill as I printed his name on the envelope. Before I sealed it, I took a coy selfie holding the fan up to my face and half-covering my smile. The thought of his future joy at putting together the image and the card brought a flush to my cheeks. I texted him the photo and went to bed wrapped in the palpable pleasure of dramatic irony.

I sent the card from a post office on my last day in Tokyo. I included my return address on the back, with no tracking number.

My family and I visited Kinkagu-ji, the golden temple, a few days later. Its beauty was prodigious but understated, organic, the product of centuries of patient care typical of the Japanese style. In a quiet moment by the lake overlooking the pavilion, I sat on a stone bench and closed my eyes. I wished for ample time with this man who had captured my attention. Never religious as a child or adult, it struck me that I might actually be praying.

*

Then I returned to New York. Still dazed with jet-lag, we met, spent the entire time engaged in each other’s touch. I traced the contour of his cheekbone, reveling in relief. Did it mean we would continue where we left off? I measured my affection, and found it even more full and pressing.

I wondered, though, why he didn’t bring up the card. I waited for a mention, even in passing, but one day, I relented and asked if he’d checked his mail recently. When he said yes, I had to drop my pretense and admit what I’d done. I knew why it hadn’t reached him: I had remembered his building well enough to look up the address, but couldn’t remember his apartment number. I assumed if there were any trouble, the card would simply return to me, but it hadn’t.

I threw myself into tracking down the lost card. I sent emails to J-Post asking to loosen the regulation on filing lost letter inquiries only from the originating post office. I submitted a search request to USPS Missing Mail, filling out a form with every detail I remembered, attaching photos. I scoured the internet for a replacement card of the same design, using search and reverse image search, even contacting the museum and several stationery stores. I attempted every kind of digital trace, fearing failure but hoping for recovery. Recovery of—what, exactly? Not merely my card, but my feeling as I sent that card, my intention to connect, to delight. Sheepishly, I confessed to my search. He laughed and said it was fine to have just a picture of the card, and thanked me for the gesture with a good-natured kiss. I assented, but felt it was a poor substitute.

I did feel some probably misplaced nostalgia for the permanence of paper. Didn’t it have a special air of romance?

Weeks passed, and I had to accept defeat. The fate of my lost letter would be left to Bartleby the Scrivener, it seemed. He had known my love for paper ephemera, had teased about my “love of the analog.” I did feel some probably misplaced nostalgia for the permanence of paper. Didn’t it have a special air of romance? I thought often of a yellow post-it note that sat on his windowsill from the time I made us a picnic lunch on a weekday. I’d doodled and written his name on it to distinguish his portion from mine (giving him the nicer-looking one), had expected it to be thrown out, but there it sat week after week.

As we spent time together, my attraction to him grew in size and complexity. Those first moments of tenderness tinged with fear became validated, and more, transformed into a bolder emotion: desire. I’d felt no discernable turning point as we waltzed on a Brooklyn subway platform, or wandered through Greenwood Cemetery, or wove through crowds to meet at the MoMA rose statue. And yet, I had opened a window into a dream in which we were a couple.

I could sense his hesitation though. We’d finally come to a juncture about our future. As much as I’d planned and longed for the immediate future, I saw that his attention was reversed, fixed on the far future. He wanted an assurance of stability I felt unable to give. I didn’t know where I’d be in five years, what I’d be doing, whether I could commit to the idea of a marriage, a family, a home. I only knew that in the present, what I wanted was connection and continuity. It wasn’t enough for him. A cold day three months after we met, we parted on a bench in Madison Square Park. I saw pain in his face, but didn’t reflect it back. Any weakness on my part might lead to a breakdown. I disputed him, weakly, but didn’t stop him from walking away. I held myself in that park and couldn’t cry, couldn’t even get up.

*

It was easiest to start an inquisition over tangible evidence, so I started with the card. Even though I knew it was irrational, I allowed myself to feel that if I had somehow executed its delivery correctly, that tiny change in the universe could have made the crucial difference. The emotional truth I felt was that I had bungled a beautiful chance, the only one that had made me feel so fervent in recent memory—if I were brave, in many years. The missing card felt symbolic of the missed connection. It was my own error. I’d failed myself.

I wondered where the card ended up, if it were read by someone, and if so, what effect it had. I’d never know the effect it would have had on my intended recipient. I wondered if the postal workers could feel how much emotional weight was in that weightless card. Had it been found, deemed unworthy of saving, or truly lost, delivered to the wrong person, dropped in a ditch? At every turn of the narrative, I felt grief well up. No communication could save me now.

A week after he and I parted ways, I went to dinner with friends at a Sichuanese restaurant. We were laughing at the cultural inauthenticity of post-meal fortune cookies and I opened mine with a half-smile. Your dearest wish will come true. My dearest. For a moment I couldn’t stop the image of him from rising up in my memory. Dear. I bit my lip to return to myself. Steadying my voice, I shared my fortune aloud and remarked how much grander it was than my friends’, how ripe for irony. I went home and shed tears.

On my desk was a notebook filled with fragments of an unsent letter I wrote to him: things I’d left unsaid, and thoughts I hadn’t formulated until I wrote them in fits, illegible and disjointed, but full of my pure honest pain. It was my tradition to purge feelings too complex for speech, feelings I’d never have the opportunity to share. Writing those nascent, searching words felt like running on a circular track, my footfalls beating the earth in time, counting laps to the marathon distance in a dream of some kind of closure.

What’s left of us is an archive of texts, spread across two messaging platforms, domestic and international. The last one he sent me read, “I wish you the best,” with just a hint of tenderness, and all its attendant finality. Melville’s character despaired at lost connections, internalized grief to the point of nihilism. I don’t despair, though, that paper proved fleeting, and texts distant and buried. I’m no longer waiting for my lost card to sail through the universe on its aborted mission.

Instead, when I see the fortune, I understand it as something the universe sent me, a countervalence to the story of a man I almost loved. Though my dearest wish might have been for him to turn around at the last minute, or for him to be the lover instead of the beloved, I no longer wish for more. I tapped a deep mine of vulnerability, forgiveness, and truth when drafting the letter. Those words were written for and because of someone I lost, but I keep them and their worth as my own.