Once upon a time, before our thumbs became our primary literary tools and autocorrect turned “love” into “live” and “duck” into something far more aggressive, we wrote letters. With pens. On actual paper. And we meant it.

I used to love writing letters. I still do, in theory. I have shoeboxes. Yes, plural. Stuffed with old letters. Love letters. Friend letters. Mad-at-you-but-still-writing-you letters. Letters folded into squares, triangles, and accordioned secrets passed under desks and mailed across time zones. Some of those letters have glitter in them. Some have stains I can’t identify anymore (coffee? tears? youth?). All of them are time capsules of me, of us, of a world that once lingered longer.

And then came texts. Efficient. Brutal. Blunt. Occasionally charming with the right emoji. But let’s be real, they don’t smell like anything, and they don’t have a doodle in the corner where I absentmindedly drew a cat or a dagger, depending on my mood.

So you can imagine my absolute delight when, in this bizarre political news cycle we’re trapped in like a glitchy Truman Show rerun, it was revealed that Donald J. Trump has been writing letters to world leaders again. Not tweets. Not memos. Not bullet-pointed PowerPoint slides. Letters.

And let’s set politics aside for just a moment, regardless of the content (and I’m sure it’s part Art of the Deal and part middle school lunch table confrontation), the medium itself deserves a standing ovation. He’s pen-pal-ing it up with global leaders like it’s 1987 and they’re about to trade cassette tapes and Lisa Frank stationery.

Look, I’m not saying Trump is channeling Emily Dickinson or James Baldwin here. But I am saying there’s something oddly refreshing about a world leader using sentences in a letter. He could have rage-tweeted a tariff into existence. Instead, he wrote a letter. I don’t care if it’s got the same tone as a Yelp review at least it wasn’t a TikTok duet.

Can we bring back letters across the board? Swap out memos for prose? Ditch bullets for paragraphs that breathe? I want your thoughts in a paragraph, not a bulleted list like a grocery run. “Empathy. Productivity. Teamwork.” No ma’am. Say it with some heart. Even if it’s passive-aggressive. Even if it’s misspelled.

Bring me back to the letters that said, “I’m mad at you, but I still made you a mixtape.” Letters where you wrote “Dear” even when you didn’t mean it. Letters that made you pause. Reflect. Lick an envelope. Risk a paper cut. Letters that didn’t get edited by Grammarly, but somehow still hit just right.

So here’s to the return of letters, whether they’re from your high school best friend who now lives in a yurt in Vermont or a new colleague. Keep your texts brief if you must, but give me letters when it counts. I want shoeboxes full of thoughts, folded and inked and lived in.

Just maybe keep the tariffs out of mine.