In order to create a mindset in any reader for the purpose of and motivation behind this work, I find it necessary to at least introduce the story that inspires it.

On my sixteenth birthday my mother allowed me to have a party and invite up to eight friends. At the time I was fairly introverted. Eight was a number difficult to attain. In addition to a few friends from school, I invited two friends I met at Girl Scout camp several years earlier. One was a tent mate, the other the sister of a counselor I greatly admired. I hardly knew Amanda* but since she lived some 60 miles away, her invitation to my party was accompanied by the invitation to spend the weekend at my house.

While we became best friends on first meeting, this story is about by the time the weekend was over, while waiting for Amanda’s mother to pick her up, we were sitting on my front porch, bundled against the cool October weather, tears in our eyes, and writing letters to each other. It seemed such an odd thing to do – writing to another and professing one’s love and undying friendship within the company of that friend – but it was not the last time we would engage in this ritual.

Just two weeks later we had an opportunity to visit again, this time during the second half of a football game where our respective high schools were competitors. While we did not write during the football game, the first thing I did when I got home was write to my friend on a piece of graph paper in dedicated response. This is what I wrote:

October 28, 1983

“I’ll write,” you said and with a wave you turned and left. I responded similarly and went on my way. Once I chanced to turn my head back over my shoulder, I couldn’t see you anymore, but I knew you were there and I smiled. “I’ll write,” wasn’t what I wanted to say. I left you with an empty feeling. Something had been left unsaid, the same something that had been left unsaid so many times before. This unspoken truth must be that which has held us in suspended animation as Time paced trenches between us. Time and distance separate us, but when we come together our spirits are unleashed from their frozen state and we meet. So tonight again I shed a part of me and hang it on a remote hook in my mind until we meet again. Should Chance have it that we never meet again, for Chance is a fussy creature and does nasty things, you shall always be my friend. If I stop here and say no more, I am leaving again without saying those possibly forgotten words. Someone must have said them sometime. Shakespeare says “Parting is such sweet sorrow” but good friends, remember, never part for what I have hung on that remote hook is the part of me that is all I have of you and you are always in my mind for that. Even if we shouldn’t write, we shan’t change except to mature in our present state. When I write, I write only in your absence and say things I should say, but probably wouldn’t say if you were here. The truth I have avoided in saying in my oblivion is no more than “I don’t want you to leave.” Now I shed a tear, one that should have been spilt on the bleachers instead of that Sunkist, but I was afraid, maybe of exposing myself. Is this why I exist, to suffer in the lack of happiness? The brief moments of happiness, perhaps too brief, that I find in speaking “mind to mind” openly with another so like myself, are soon passed. Maybe it is best we are far apart. I will never grow tired of your company but I would never risk your friendship on such a trivial greed as having you always here. It just makes those precious few moments ever more so preciously priceless.

Over the years, we have exchanged many letters. I moved to another state. We both attended college. She graduated the day I married my husband. I had dropped out of college. In every letter I wrote, and now even in e-mails, I struggle to understand our relationship. In 1983 I could find no literature or record of correspondence between women like my own with Amanda. I wrestled with terms and definitions like lesbian and questioning my sexuality. I have been on a quest since my sixteenth birthday to try to bring some meaning and understanding to this very important part of my life and being.

This paper is a significant step to understanding these eighteen years of intimate friendship. In my research I have found other authors struggling with names and labels in a heterosexist, post-Freudian world. But most of all, I have found letters – hundreds of them – by women to women who write of the same thoughts and feelings I had that October night in 1983.

Scholars and collectors of women’s romantic letters to other women point out themes and practices embodied in this one sheet of paper I wrote. Women wrote on different types of paper to their friends. They wrote in and about absence, about the waiting for the next letter. They quoted authors seeking characters and phrases to match their feelings. They discuss time and the possibility of never meeting again. They write about their soul mate and letter recipient as a mirror and worthy intellectual counterpart. Most of all, they all write about love; a love that is so real and yet so different from any they know and ever will know.