The last two letters waiting for me to be replied have been read, replied and posted today. It would normally be a sad thing for me, as now I have no letter waiting for me, no friend whose words to read, whose world to share and with whom to laugh and cry, dream and make this planet a better place for all. The last two letters. I could have carried them with me, but I wanted to make use to the last minute of the trusty Hungarian Postal Service, so I had decided to send all of my letters from here. All the rest should now be addressed to my old P.O.Box in Costa Rica. Yes, I didn't resign that one, but actually it for thsi year as well. All my replies then, will be addressed also from Costa Rica, with stickers for stamps, depicting the Costa Rican flora and fauna with little holograms to make it more pretty.
My last letters had all to depart with plenty of warnings for my penpals, reminding them not to use the sender address on the envelope, but my old one. Just in case - if any of my penpals is like me - I added my old Costa Rican address in the letter, and wrote all sorts of warnings on the envelope around my address as sender, just in case - like me - they tend to address their letters by copying the address on the envelope their friends just sent them.
You may say that I could have been a bit smarter and write my Costa Rican address on the Sender spot, but that can't really be done. A Postal Office worker told me, and truth is that she was right. You see, when you send yourt letter, you are paying for the letter to be sent to your friend at a given address. If your friend isn't there, then the letter should make the same trip and go back to you. The trip back to you shouldn't be more expensive than the one you sent your letter to originally. In part it's to make sure that people are always informed when their letters don't reach the destination, but also to avoid people paying a cheaper fare to have their letters sent. Say, I want to send a letter to a friend in Australia. so I write her address as sender and a phony address directed to... Austria as my destination. No one would get my letter in Austria, so when it is sent back, it would be sent to my friend in Australia. As result, instead of paying some 3€ for sending the letter, I'd pay only 0,63€. Weird, but worse things happen, such as people who smear glue on their stamps and ask their friends to mail them back, so they can reuse them. (When you smeak glue on the top of the stamps, the ink from the postmark won't stick on it, so once it's carefully washed off the envelope, the postmark washes off as well and the stamp looks unused. This practice isn't a "smart thing" to do, it is fraud. If you have a penpal doing this, consider asking them not to do it, and if they do it because they have no money, consider going digital. E-mails, after all, are for free.)
All those letters, those words and the replies to them gave me a blister on my finger. It's actually a blister on top of a callous I've got from writing when I was in elementary school, and which never disappeared. My hand hurts a tiny little bit, and maybe my finger looks a bit uglier than before, but as I touch that soft little blister, that rough little mound on my finger I think about my friends, how much I love them and how grateful I am for having them in my life. I don't mind it, I love handwriting letter to my friends, and their leght doesn't matter in the least, only the things we say to each other, the feeling trapped in those words and the smiles you can still feel through the pen and the paper.
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