I write letters to one person, mostly, and badly, in the sense of slowly.
Jo moved to Glasgow three years ago. We were the kind of friends who saw each other without arranging it, and then she was five thousand miles and eight hours ahead, and the friendship had to find another shape or stop being one. It found another shape. We write.
Not constantly. That's the part I keep wanting to explain to people who ask why we don't just call. We could call. We do, occasionally, and it's lovely and a little effortful, two people fitting a conversation into the narrow gap between her evening and my morning. But the letters are the real thing. Long emails, mostly, answered weeks after they were sent. The odd postcard.
The last thing I sent her was a postcard of a roadside fruit stand that I bought in a museum gift shop for no reason I could give you. It had nothing to do with anything. I wrote four lines on the back and posted it, and it took, I think, eleven days to reach her.
The last thing I got was her account of a wet October, which arrived in my inbox in December, six weeks after the weather it described had cleared. By the time I read about her rain it was someone else's rain, historical rain, and that was somehow better than if she'd told me in the middle of it. I got the October she'd already finished having. Sorted through, chosen, only the bits worth keeping.
I've decided the delay is part of the affection rather than a flaw in it. A fast reply says: you're in front of me right now. A slow one says: I carried you around for three weeks and answered when I had something worth your time. The first is warmer in the moment. The second is the one I can keep.
We're both terrible correspondents by any modern standard, and we both prefer it this way, and I don't expect either of us to reform. I owe her a letter right now, as it happens. I'll get to it. She knows I will. That's the whole arrangement, and it suits us.