Hannah Katy from As Simple As That is brilliant. I love this girl. She is a stranger to my face, but not to my heart. She seems to write everything that I am feeling.
On 10/10/10 she wrote a post called "Sara Bareilles would not write you a love song but I want to write you a love letter." She describes how she writes random “love notes” to strangers and leaves them in places all around New York City. On buses, in bathrooms, on park benches. She leaves encouraging little notes for strangers to find.
I love this idea. It sort of reminds me of my teenage self, when I used to sneak secret anonymous love messages into the lockers of the boys I liked, but of who didn’t know I was breathing the same air. And then I would get to watch their faces the next day. Then senior year the school installed cameras in every hallway, making it near impossible to sneak a letter through the vent cracks without having it being recorded on video tape. But don’t you worry, I pulled it off. I'm stealth.
Several times I left letters in the public library. There was this drawer underneath one of the tables near the magazine collection, and I fully wrote a note and stuck it in there. No reply, though.
My favorite thing ever is to write secret messages and leave them places. It’s excellent when they are love messages, and it is more excellent when you get to see the person’s reaction, but not all the time is it possible to see their response. My messages are always anonymous. They don’t need to know who I am. It’s better if they don’t.
Anyway, Hannah inspired me to revisit this old pastime, and I sent off my first stranger love letter this past weekend. I wrote down some encouraging words, sealed it in an envelope, and carried it around with me while I ran errands. I ended up leaving it in the library, because that’s my favorite place. Next time I’ll leave it elsewhere. I had the envelope in my hand in the parkade, ready to put it on someone’s windshield, but I didn’t. Something didn’t feel right. Once I got inside the library, I decided to leave it in a book. But not just any book, a book that I knew would be read soon. And no, it wasn’t a copy of Twilight or whatever. I went to the hold shelf and snuck it in someone’s book. So now they’ll get a little surprise when they sit down to read it next week.
Secret messages are the best.
I used to do this a lot when I was in middle-school. I would write (usually love) letters to nobody and then drop them in the halls when class was changing and hope someone would pick them up and read them. I stopped doing this when I came to the conclusion that most of them probably got swept into dustbins by the custodians. However, fairly recently, a friend of mine found a typed love letter in a bush at her university and it really meant a lot to her, so you may be touching someone's life with this.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you haven't already heard of this website, you may like it. http://foundmagazine.com/
-Annie Onymous
Dear Annie,
ReplyDeleteYou sound slightly more mature than I was as a youth, considering you did your love note writing in middle school. And okay, I fully took mine through senior year, but I think I brought a lot of joy and hope to those boys. Love the website suggestion, it is quite awesome.