The Girl Who Saved The Postal Service

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The moment she heard the news, she ran outside and got into her car.

She drove the thirteen miles to the nearest Target, slammed the driver’s side door shut, and raced inside.

Grabbed a red plastic basket — she was going to need it.

It wasn’t until she reached the stationery section that she broke down and cried.

A young mother with an antsy toddler in the front seat of plastic carts slowed her steps to raise an eyebrow at the girl on hands and knees, scooping packs of blank note cards into her basket.

She filled it to the brim with all the supplies she needed to fight the system: packs of pens, blank invitations and thank-you notes, note cards and envelopes.

The cashier at the checkout counter, a sweet old man with the smile the size of Kentucky, scanned each item and placed them gingerly in the bag.

“You heard what they’re saying on the television, right?” he said. “About the postal service?”

“I heard.” She bounced up and down on her heels, rubbed her hands over her biceps. “Uh huh. I heard.”

“It’s not gonna shut down right now,” he assured her. “Been around since the country’s founding and it’s not going anywhere.”

She ignored this.

“I figure if I send at least fifty letters to fifty people, and those fifty people send fifty letters, that’s already thousands of letters in the mail. That’s already thousands of people having a conversation.”

“You kids these days.” He laughed and handed her a receipt. “You think you can just do something small and it’s going to matter to the higher-ups. The government’s a big mess. A big self-centered mess.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “All those government people, they all have family too.”

He handed her one of the bags.

“So they want to keep in touch with their families. They want to get a handwritten note still on their birthdays.”

“Honey,” he said. “My family stopped sending me birthday cards almost 50 years ago.”

“What’s your name?”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a sticky note pad and a pen.

He tapped his nametag. Carl. New Team Member etched underneath.

“Well, Carl New Team Member, I’m going to add you to my list.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” he said.

“I’m not. I think you know 50 people who want a letter. I think you can save the postal service.”

And then she exited the store, hauling her bags to the car.

It was raining outside when she got back to her house. She darted to the front door, juggled her house keys and slipped inside.

Then she sat down, wrote straight through the night.

When her wrist ached and her eyes closed, she thought about the generation after her. The generation dedicated to text messages deleted every two years when they traded in for new phones. She thought about her own pile of letters, crumpled and stained at the bottom of her desk drawer.

She could smell the parchment, feel the pages beneath her fingertips. She didn’t know what would happen if she didn’t have that.

She waited until the sun came up before she walked the mile to her driveway and stuffed the mailbox full. She raised the red flag on the side and waited, dazed, worried the mailman wouldn’t come. 

—

Hannah Brencher believes the world needs more love letters. Don’t let this beautiful project die because Congress won’t bail out the postal service. Write a handwritten note today.

Slices of pie and shards of glass: relics of the past.

day 14 – someone you’ve drifted away from

Dear Christine,

I don’t know if drifted is the right word. It’s more like if you leave something really good out on the counter, like a slice of pie, but you forget to cover it, and when you come back a few days later the pie’s still there but it’s not quite as good. What’s ironic is that in our own haste to be exactly the same sort of driven and busy person, we often run out of time for each other.

I don’t want to point fingers and place blame, because its not one of our faults more than another. What hurts is always calling, never getting a phone call back for weeks. But persistence is a word I seemed to have let slip away too easily. A word that found solace in my heart for so long, but for some reason ran off at the first opportunity.

We used to joke that together, we had enough diversity in talents and interests to put together a film. Me, the writer. You, the cinematographer. Em, the actor. Juan, the director. Vanessa, the animator. Julie, the editor. That’s half a film right there. Instead of worrying about missteps and who said what to who or who should have reached for the phone first, we should have been creating something. Something bigger than us.

It’s a shame we don’t talk as much, because we could sit in a room and bounce ideas off each other. We could talk about just about anything and make the other person feel less lost or worried or anxious. You and me, we understand each other. And sometimes, we lose sight of that. We trudge over boundaries and cross into new territory and try to make the leap to the New World without holding onto any small fragment of the Old World.

And that’s all I’m asking. To be that small fragment, a shard of glass or a charm that you can stick deep down in your pocket, pulling it out whenever you start losing yourself because you think the rest of the world will always hold something better. The past grounds us, but it doesn’t have to hold us back. We’re better for it.

There are times for pressing forward and times for turning back. There are times for comfort in the warmth of a familiar face and times for chills and excitement as we race to the finish line. As we propel ourselves to be the first, the greatest, the next best thing, don’t we want that assurance that if we feel like we’re drowning, someone’s standing on shore with the life preserver?

Love,
K

You have created a YouTube revolution of echoes, a resounding chorus from teenage girls.

day 9 – someone you wish you could meet

Dear Taylor Swift,

via weheartit.com

I think you and I would be best friends in real life. Not just because we’re two 20-something-year-old girls from southeastern PA trying to find our place in this world, but also because we both have the same worries and the same aspirations.

Sometimes I think you are writing the story of my life instead of yours. Sometimes I want to call you up and have a heart-to-heart about life and love and figuring out where I fit in this world.

I know that you’re in an entirely different ballpark than me. Red carpets line your sidewalks and broken beer bottles litter mine. I walk outside of my townhouse to a small town populated with 18- to 22-year-olds and you step outside to a big city, a sprawling metropolis.

But — and this is a big but — you’re not that different from all the girls who sing your lyrics in the shower with the water drowning out their lack of tone. All the girls who strum guitars and softly whisper along to the melody in front of a webcam, sharing their own feelings with the rest of the world the only way they know how. I don’t know you, but I know that that’s what goes through your head when you write.

I am a writer, too. Us writers, we have to stick together. You use words to string together a powerful argument that you otherwise might back down from rather than articulate. I do the same thing.

Know that by doing that, by standing up — hard as it may be — you are doing a tremendous service to the teenage girls in the world who are silencing themselves for the sake of others. Your presence in the media gives you power, and that power gives you a choice: speak out or conform.

Thank you for speaking out, for sharing your missteps and mistakes with anyone who will listen. But don’t be afraid to keep making mistakes and keep searching for new experiences, new boundaries to cross.

I know you said college isn’t for you. That high school wasn’t for you, either. And I know that you’ve never met me and probably never will, but trust me when I say that I’ve been there. I was there less than a year ago.

Give it a chance. Please, please give college a chance. Because the most wonderful feeling in the world is figuring out you do have a place. Waking up each day and knowing where you fit into this universe.

College isn’t for everyone. And maybe it’s not for you. But don’t let your fear be an anchor holding you back.

I wrote this with the entirely naïve believe that someday down the road you might read it. That’s the only way to write. Laying your heart out there for the world to take it in. You’re living proof of that.

Love,
K

Bridging the gap between strangers and friends.

Dear stranger,

I grew up with the notion that strangers were bad. “Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t take candy from them. Don’t get into the back of their white industrial van.”

Don’t believe that a stranger can be anything but that — a stranger.

In less than a few months, I’ve discovered that strangers do not always have to be strangers. Strangers can morph into friends. They can become people you know through a computer screen, brought together by a wireless connection that spans hundreds of thousands of miles.

If there is one thing the Internet has done for me, it has taken the word “stranger” and redefined it. It has saved me from darkness, from being swallowed up in a pit of my own, self-constructed loneliness.

This blog alone has made the idea of a “stranger” seem like a foreign concept. Each person I encounter through posts, comments and trackbacks becomes a potential friend. An instantaneous kindred spirit of sorts.

When almost one hundred people commented on one of my most recent posts, each of them spilling their heart out to me, I did not feel like a stranger. I felt like a friend, sitting down in a coffee shop, listening as they rehashed stories to me. As people complimented my undying respect for my parents, as if I were the reader’s own child, I smiled and turned bright red and tried to take a compliment.

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Stranger, I do not know you, but we might be best friends. We might have obvious commonalities, both interested in the same bands, both track runners in high school, both former competitive gymnasts, both exhausted by a tireless little sister. Or our connection might be invisible, as we bond over our introverted personality traits, our tendency to view the world through a kaleidoscope of color.

Even though we have never met face-to-face, we can still share a connection. You can still read the words I type and try to feel the way I do. I can still smile and laugh with you. And we can be friends.

Stranger, let’s be friends.

Love,
K

#reverb10 day 4 – How did I cultivate a sense of wonder in my life? I opened my eyes. I drove through streets with a racing mind and a keen interest in every little detail around me. The second an idea popped into my head, I rushed to write it down.
#reverb10 day 5 – What did you let go of this year? The car, among other things.

You have erased the word “depression” from the dictionary in my heart.

Day 4 – your sibling

Dear Kels,

You are beautiful. I thought about a million other ways to start, but there is no other place but that.

I envy you for your long, crazy Herbal Essences-like hair, your daring fashion sense, your ability to be who you are every day without a care in the world. I envy your innocence, the way you still shine and brighten each day, painting it with your love. I hope you never lose that.

There are millions of people in the world who have never met you, who cannot even begin to know what they are missing. I am sure thousands of them would love you if they met you. You have that effect on people.

I hope you never let anyone walk all over you, that you deserve more appreciation than you’re given. I hope someday a boy falls in love with you for the person you are, not the person he wants you to be.

The other day, I started thinking about what would happen if I had more than one sister. Would I be able to love them as much as you? Would I be filled up with so much love that the word “depression” would erase itself from the dictionary in my heart?

The best feeling in the world comes when my face hurts from laugh with you. When you tell me to stop making faces into the sideview mirror of your car at the loud rap music pumping through my ears. And I beg and plead until you turn on Taylor Swift for me. The best ab workout is spending time with you.

I know that I will never be you, that I will never dress the same or say the same things, but that’s what I love: waking up each day, two hundred miles away, knowing you have not changed. That you have not compromised yourself.

So many people in this world love you — the Real You. You are true to yourself and your infectious energy can change the world.

You are my laughter, my noise, my chaos.

Love,
K