Where are they now?

When I was 12 years old, I had 42 pen pals.

I kept an old dress box with all my letters in it under my bed, never throwing anything away, not even the torn envelopes. I read and re-read each letter. The postman's daily delivery always had something for me.

I read when I needed solace. I read to create a world of friendships outside my little room and outside my introverted, self-conscious little self. I wrote letters pages and pages long, telling who knows what to my friends, these strangers from everywhere. To the wind and the darkness outside my window.

There was the boy from Ceylon, who asked if I might send him some soccer shoes.

The guy whose name I took from that column that used to be in Rolling Stone, the one featuring prisoners seeking pen pals to keep them company while they did time. In jail for a bag of pot.

That girl from Detroit, Penny, for whom I pretended my name was Peggy for reasons I've forgotten now.

And Joanne from Ontario who sent me a photo of her with long hair blowing in the wind.

Harriet, whose name seemed too old for a 13 year old, and whom I imagined as a character in one of my short stories.

The boy from Korea, Ki, who proved wrong my assumption that everyone there lived in grass huts, with a photo of his hometown, Soeul.

Rabbit from California...wait, he wasn't my pen pal. He was the boy who went to Vietnam and only brought part of himself back.

Sometime along the way, the letter box lost its magical place in my world. Sometime I emptied all but a few of my precious letters into the trash. None of them remain. All those words lost forever.

There's an old photo album that I bring out sometimes. In it, two pages with some of my pen pals there. Faces forever young. People I have never met and never will.

I wonder sometimes when it was that I stopped writing. Was it me or they who stopped first?

I wonder, too, who each of them has become in the world and if they still live. And if they ever think about all those words and stories and dreams we shared so long ago.

Ever wonder about me.