Dear _____,

I'm here at the dining room table doing what has become my favorite pastime: writing a letter.

Not typing. Not dictating. Just me, a piece of cardstock, and a trusty Pilot G2 pen.

Nothing in my field of vision besides these things, my hands, and my mug of coffee. And though some of it may end up on my website, no intended audience for the moment but you.

I love the simplicity.

I love the tactile physicality of it. I'm not a physical person. not into sports, not much one for working with my hands. Yet this feels like a physical activity. My hands are in contact with the pen and cardstock, and I form each of the letters.

In an email, yes, I can choose the font, but here it's a unique font, my particular set of letters. This is Derek font. It's me.

There are no tabs that I can click on to dart away from the task at hand. Just these words I form in the blank space below them.

It slows me down. Thoughts in my head are quieter. There is less tension. There are fewer thoughts of conflict and more thoughts of collaboration and things working together as opposed to being at odds.

Some of what I write is me taking one small thing and making it surreal. What if I'm actually all alone in the world and am in fact writing a letter to an imaginary person?

Or I find some sort of meaning. More and more I do the second, not because I've lost the ability to see things in a skewed way, but because having slowed down and quieted down, I notice more than I used to.

Yes, I still ask: what if it were this way instead? At the same time, I find myself thinking: okay, maybe it's just this particular way. So what do I notice about this particular way? What is there to it that I may not have noticed before?

Right now, I think about this letter. I start considering all the things that it means. I think about how I have almost no real family left, and need to keep in contact with those about whom I care deeply.

I’m so glad we've kept in touch. It's almost a cliche at this point, but I don't think that society has ever been at once so connected and so alienated. People stare at screens and tap out fragments of words, abbreviations, and emojis, and then wait for a burst of those things to appear on their screen in response. They feel like they're part of a community. And look, maybe they are. For me, whenever I do that sort of thing, I become even more aware that I'm alone, sitting at a computer or staring at my phone.

Oddly, I feel more connected when I write letters. Yes, as I said, there's nothing here but me, the pen, and the paper. And at the same time, if I look closer, if I think about it, it's not just paper. It's a piece of paper that's constantly changing as it fills up with words. And these words and letters will never appear on another sheet of paper in exactly the same way.

At the present, no auto-pen can create what I'm creating right now, a set of words in which each of these letters is unique. Each time I write the letter E, it's different from every letter E that comes before and after it. If there was a convention of every letter E that's been in every letter I’ve written, they'd all have these slightly different characteristics that make them that specific letter E. They’d all have different personalities and different voices, I bet.

I kind of feel as if I'm giving someone more than just a set of words when I write a letter. I'm giving them this artifact of this moment in my life when, after 40 years of scribbling countless unfinished things, I just decided to write letters to people with the intent of making them enjoyable letters to read.

I hope that was the case here.

Be well.

Written March 24, 2026