Reliving My Past Through Postcards
By: Hoa P. Nguyen
Tags: Past, Mail, Postcards, Memories, Love

Photo by Allie on Unsplash

I love postcards. I love receiving them, to be exact. I also love crying, and even more so while reading over the postcards that I’ve received throughout the years. Just the other night, I burst out crying after a call with my boyfriend, in which I had been scouring through plastic folders of postcards, trying to retrieve a piece of mail attached to a hurtful college memory. As the world is in shambles at the moment and most recently, with the U.S. Postal Service being in the news for all the worrisome reasons, I thought I would share the story of my personal bond with the mail.

I started keeping every single postcard sent to me since senior year of high school. We had this low-key pen pal-like activity where you would write a letter or a postcard to someone in your class, submit to a committee, and they would deliver it for you. Basically an in-house postal service if you will. By the end of the year, I collected seven postcards and brought all of them to the U.S. with me. I still have them at my disposal up to this day.

This was my first attempt to keep track of my life. I remember one postcard was from my very first boyfriend. We dated for 17 months, quite long for a very first relationship (right?), but the epilogue was quite bitter. I sent him a letter first, then he responded, marking the first time we communicated again since the relationship ended. He talked about how our time together still mattered a lot to him, despite the chaos and misunderstanding. He hoped that I’d eventually find love because that would make him happy, too. It was an act of peace, finally.

Another memory from this era was from a mysterious person who signed “secret admirer” at the end of the letter. Re-reading it now, I think I know who this is, but I’m not entirely sure. She talked about being the accidental friend who had sat close to me in class since 10th grade, but we only became close during senior high. At the time, I was scrambling between competing in the national Russian contest (oh yes, I really did that) and applying for colleges in the States. She said she was afraid whenever I asked her to read over my personal statements, because they signified the next stage of our lives, one that was no longer naive and carefree. Little did we know, college was only a threshold leading us to early adulthood, a period filled with unadulterated fears, misplaced expectations and occasional bliss.

Little did we know, college was only a threshold leading us to early adulthood, a period filled with unadulterated fears, misplaced expectations and occasional bliss.

Okay, one last story for this round. I received two letters from two friends: one had a crush on me and the other was a close-ish friend one year below me. The crush person wrote that he still liked me a lot and considered me one of his confidants (I believe it was unrequited still). The other friend wrote that she loved me for being a great sister to her throughout the time we’d known each other. Fast forward to today, these two have been dating for six years, and I know for a fact that they’re also tying the knots. Fun, right? Many interesting turns, such wow.

America, a scary yet exciting chapter of my life began six years ago. And I have the receipts (or postcards) to back it up.

Now that there’s no such thing as free postal service, I actually receive these postcards in the mail, and I believe that receiving a handwritten postcard or letter is peak intimacy. Fight me!

The experiences documented in these postcards are undoubtedly different from the ones I had in Vietnam. Some are sent from other states, from other countries, in real time while the person is travelling or just randomly thinking of me, for which I’m deeply grateful and honored. I love seeing the colorful stamps that flaunt all kinds of artistic designs, the picturesque scenery depicted of a faraway land, or elaborate, cheesy poems inscribed across all of the pages.

The most amazing cards, of course, are handmade. One of my favorite cards is from my college friend/lovely sister Olive, who not only sketched a digital portrait of me and gave me the “kween” nickname, but she also attached a piece of paper that she made from scratch from Mount Holyoke’s maple leaves. She said she wanted me to keep a (literal) piece of our college anywhere I go. Ugh, I can’t with this!

My two best friends from college, Lan and Hannah, also know me too well so they send me cute postcards all the time. It’s a shame that I can’t be physically close to them now, but never have I ever felt like we’re drifting apart because I’m sure they’re always watching over me, and I’d like to do the same for them.

Most recently, I received a postcard from my boyfriend on my 24th birthday. It was a card from a Lower East Side restaurant that we went to during one of our first dates. It’s crazy to think that the progression of our relationship is parallel with a pandemic. It feels very long yet only half a year has passed. That day we decided to become official still feels brand new, but we’ve truly lived through a historic time while having each other. Postcards have that power of compressing time and memories into bite-sized pieces, condensing our scattered feelings into droplets of joy.

Speaking of happiness, postcards can also be tremendously heart-breaking, not when they first arrive in our mailbox, but when we re-read them and things aren’t the same. Someone might tell you how crucial you are in their life, just so you can find out months after that words can be cruelly deceiving, too. Or when you come across a postcard from a friend who’s not close anymore, because sometimes, we just outgrow a friendship. Here, words can induce melancholy and nostalgia, a time that only in retrospect did we realize was a happier time.

Words can induce melancholy and nostalgia, a time that only in retrospect did we realize was a happier time.

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“Isn’t it just so pretty to think, all along there was some invisible string tying you to me?” — invisible string, Taylor Swift

I think postcards make up an invisible string too, a string of lived experiences, happy and sad, pure and contaminated, all depending on when we stumble upon them as we actively reflect on our lives. At times, we might feel like there are parts that no longer fit in the grand scheme of things, but they would just be there, engraved in a piece of paper and constantly remind us that things did happen. Bits and pieces of our past, ugly or beautiful, will stay with us forever, thanks to the great conveyor of life that is the mail.