When I was twelve years old, my English teacher gave everyone in the class the name and address of a student in another country. We were told to write them a letter, introduce ourselves, and ask a few questions. Most of my classmates wrote one letter and forgot about it. But the person I was matched with, a girl called Yuki from Japan, wrote back within two weeks, and that was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted over twenty years.
In the early days, we wrote to each other about simple things — our favourite subjects at school, the food we liked, what our towns looked like. The letters took about ten days to arrive, and there was always a thrill in finding an envelope with Japanese stamps in the postbox. Each letter taught me something new about a culture I knew almost nothing about.
As we got older, our letters became longer and more personal. We wrote about our hopes for the future, problems with friends, and the pressure of exams. Yuki's English improved enormously, and I even started learning a few phrases in Japanese, though I was never very good at it. What mattered was that we were honest with each other in a way that is sometimes easier in writing than face to face.
We finally met in person five years ago, when Yuki came to London for a work conference. I was nervous beforehand — what if we had nothing to say to each other in real life? But the moment we sat down in a café near my flat, it felt as though we had known each other forever. Which, in a way, we had.
People sometimes ask me why I still write letters when I could just send a message on my phone. The answer is that a letter means something different. It takes time, thought, and effort. Every letter Yuki has ever sent me is in a box under my bed. I can't imagine keeping twenty years of text messages.