There’s a stack of letters sitting in my bookshelf. They’re alone — everything else in the room is packed for my return to the United States after several years of living abroad. I’m not ready to pack them just yet.

Having a pen pal in grade school is fun, but having one at age 24 is something totally different. Other students in my program have noted my regular flow of letters — real mail is like gold here — and looking forward to the next battered envelope keeps my sprits up during grueling schedules and study periods.

I’ve been writing M, a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps, for a year. Our parents, those usual agents of set-ups everywhere, arranged this during their ballroom dancing lessons on Monday and Tuesday nights. By the time I returned home for a month to visit, the trap was already laid. By the end of my month, I was good friends with M’s father, and so I quickly agreed to a favor: please write his son, who was far away in the Marine Corps, a letter just so he’d have some mail.

I couldn’t refuse. Besides, I love all the details of correspondence — the stationery, envelopes, stamps, address books — all of it. So I sent a short introductory missive before I left to return to grad school in Italy, expecting nothing in return. That started one of the best correspondences I’ve ever had.

We talk about our families, how much we love our home state Colorado. We talk about being teens, and our high school years, and things that could have gone better. We talk about trivial things: the latest TV shows, best books and our favorite movies. We talk about important things: the future, our lives right now and what will come next. We talk about the things that scare us and things that give us hope.

He asks great questions. Sometimes they are about my life abroad; sometimes, specific topics related to my previous letter. My favorites are the unconnected ones about whatever he was thinking at the moment, things like my least-liked color, most influential mentors and the most important thing in my life.

We share stories of our days, mishaps, interesting things and asides. He asks about Italian life; I ask about all kinds of military questions (I really and honestly know nothing about the armed services, I’ve discovered). It’s been an education for me, and I can only hope my letters have been an escape for him.

We talk about politics and religion, but never about why he’s in Iraq. I never tell him how scared for him I am, or that I spent the first minutes of every day anxiously scanning headlines, praying for no news from Iraq: no bombings, attacks, ambushes, explosions or fire fights. When I get a letter, I do a little mental math and send an e-mail to his dad “I got a letter — as of 21 days ago, all is well in Iraq …”

There’s an envelope waiting for an address on my desk. M is on the move, and he doesn’t have an address for me yet. I hope that means he’s coming back to the U.S. for good. He’s planning on starting college in Colorado in the fall, and I’m finishing my MBA and heading back to Colorado, too.

I have no idea what will happen when this time is over. Maybe there will still be letters flying between us. Maybe we’ll actually talk instead. Perhaps there will be more to our story. (The parents, though, they have hopes, as parents always do.)

No matter what, in a difficult time in our lives, we each had someone there to listen to our stories, give some advice, share a moment and laugh. We built a friendship out of paper, pen, some stamps and our lives, as best we could explain them on sheets of paper. The humble snail mail system delivered friendship in way rarely seen these days — something remarkable in an extraordinary time.

Tess Montano is a guest writer for This Ordinary Day. She was recently a program coordinator for an international graduate program in Asolo, Italy, about an hour north of Venice.

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