Not the same as doing it.

In just under a months time it will be Christmas. That season of joy and giving,  a time to remember with cards and good wishes for those friends and family who you still wish to remember.

 The Post Office used to be, when far away at Christmas time the point of contact where you would queue to receive what mail was waiting for you at 'Poste Restante' and then scurry away with your pile of letters and cards to sort into piles, family, friends and lovers !! 

Like savouring something special you kept the special to the last, to be opened with trepidation was it good news, she still loved you or bad, she had met another. The pathos of those letters, the stories and the signs we read into them the happiness they gave, or the misery as we walked away into the sun drenched street, alone.
Letter writing and particularly the letters one kept seem, as you read them today no less poignant now than than when you first opened them except that with hindsight you now know the outcome.
They stop the clock and revisit the emotion of the event so many many years ago. It was a time when you were raw with expectation yet reluctant to commit, when the question was, is there still something more just around the corner or was this as good as it gets.

The distance between you and the letter writer allowed you to consider the alternatives, the heady urges were of a reflective nature, not the hot impulse of the warm lips but the crosses on the bottom of the page were as a symbol of something you needed but still on your own terms.
Sitting down to write back that night, the urgent need to catch the next post, the turmoil of a "Dear John" still ringing in your ears or the self satisfied confirmation that she still loved you and you still loved her needed addressing and so you wrote that long laborious outpouring of sentiment.
5 days for a letter to find its way to the directed address and another 5 days for the reply given that a response was as urgent as yours. Sometimes the good news would cross the bad. She had met this chap was on its way to you as you were professing your undying love. That unhealthy tryst which is caused by total absorption, not only of your feeling for her but also your feelings for yourself, since in all these affairs you are somewhat unhinged.

It was all made the more surreal by being on your own in a foreign country with no support mechanism. The dice were all loaded against you. You had to keep throwing double six to keep both her and your interest at a peak. Talking about love and sex is not the same as doing it !!