When I first started thinking about writing publicly, I kept returning to a long email I wrote my friend Al (as in al, not ai), an internet friend I made over Tumblr when I found a comment of his on the post of a photographer we both adored. I started following him when I saw a photograph he took which made me feel nostalgic, sentimental for a place I once called home.

I was living on the Galapagos Island, working at a hostal in exchange for board and breakfast. The town was small, and I saw sea lions hanging out on the beach everyday. My life was slower than usual. I got into an argument with an old friend in a group chat, my cheeks getting heated as I stated my point emphatically. I hung out with the local hostal cat. I made photographs of animal motifs on my daily walks, determined to make it a photo series (still in my folders, archived). I was barely journalling then, only photos and chat updates to friends and family to mark my days.

One day I finally replied Al. I hadn’t replied him for months, our correspondence often in spurts and stops, months and years apart. I wrote him the longest piece of email I wrote my whole time away. Vignettes from my days on the island, kissing boys across language barriers, dreams about my cousin I never talk to and losing underwater pictures of our diving trip.

Back then I was still dreaming of diving.

Two and a half years ago, when I had given myself an internal deadline of moving towards starting my business in a year’s time when my old job finished their funding, I decided to start a private Instagram to write about days, to practice writing out loud, in public, where strangers could potentially read my words. Titrating my way to my growing edges of what terrified me.

I found myself searching up my email to Al from 2017 over and over, whenever I began bullying myself about what I was writing. I tasted regret lingering, wishing I had wrote more on that entire trip, so I could recall what the hell I was thinking, feeling, sensing. That email to Al felt intimate, revealing, stories I don’t think I would have necessarily written in my journal.

People say to write for yourself. But writing, like everything, is relational. As a child of Venus, my desire to write stems from my desire to connect. With Jupiter transiting through my 3H of writing, I am feeling that simultaneous nostalgia for slowing down with my pen for an audience of one.

This Mercury year, with my progressed Moon still in Gemini and Jupiter transiting my 3H, I am writing a letter a week to someone - strangers, friends, readers - who would like to receive a handwritten letter by snail mail. You get to decide if you’d like an open letter (general musings aka me riffing from the poetics of my life), or if you would like my perspective about a question you are holding in your heart.

This last week I also decided I am walking 10,000 steps a day. As I write to neighbours (near and far), I am hoping this will aid me in walking around my neighbourhood with purposeful strides to my local postbox - an errand that usually feels like a chore, and instead transform this errand into a fulfilling mission as Sailor Mercury delivering words from my heart to yours.

Receive a handwritten letter for free here.