121. Love Letters

It is no secret among those I rant to that I am in love with words on paper (... words not on paper can suck it, except this blog, which I one day plan to put on paper.)  There's something about the tactile element of printed language that awes me.  That I can touch it and even smell it makes a well-written word such a living thing.  When you print an idea you make it real, and extant, and evocative.  Printed words don't evaporate like spoken ones.  They aren't inevitably mangled with each repetition.  They exist.  They can be burned and destroyed, but so can anything.  So can I.  And yet here I am.

Because of all this I have a subtle fetish with the instruments of writing.  The things we use to write real words.  Simple pen and paper. I cannot remember a time when I didn't have a favorite pen.  When I was 12 it was the fine-point purple Pentels my sister used to take notes in grad school.  Now it's black fine-point Sharpies and RSVPs.  I dread writing with anything else.  I cannot write good thoughts with a bad pen.  I imagine that someday I'll have a favorite paper as well.  Probably something expensive.

In the meantime I hang out in stationery stores, eyeing loose-leaf paper and notecards, imagining the things I might write on them and who I might send them to.  My newest crush is on letterpress paper.  It's touch and texture on a whole other level.  Yeah, it's done by a machine, but still.  It's pretty cool.  One of my classmates once wrote that if she could do anything in the world she would move to California and open a letterpress shop.  I wondered at the time why she wasn't doing that. 

Now she has a daughter and a not-yet-written dissertation.  But I like to think that somewhere life may have tucked away a big noisy letterpress printing machine and a drawer of full of ink-stained linen shirts with her name on them.  Maybe one day, a long time from now, we'll be a writer and a letterpress printer, catching up in a little paper shop in California.