I try to take a picture of every spot where I write postcards, just in case my missives arrive intact and the recipients are curious. This tree house in the jungle comes complete with a gangly pup in his afternoon loll.

I have always thought of being a turtle when it comes to postcards. I’m a slow-moving person overall and have always been. (Notable exceptions: catching busses, falling in love, and, occasionally, work stuff.) I even include this information in my OKCupid profile: “I move slowly and I like myself that way, so you should too,” cuz this is not something I will suffer any shit for. I would rather not eat than shovel food down, and if you need to go I can eat alone. I am simply not to be rushed.

Postcards are small pieces of my silliest heart sent through unknown channels for pennies in the hopes that they’ll arrive at the door of a loved one, someday. (I’ve had about an 80% success rate at this, though if I include unwritten blanks it’s probably more like 40%.) In this way I am a mother turtle, settling gently into the sand to leave a small gift, then packing it up and leaving it be, and trusting the world to deliver it in due time. These little messes of crappy handwriting and half-thunk thoughts work just as slowly as anything I’ve done. Sometimes they take months; almost always they arrive well after I’ve returned from adventure. They are my turtle babies, developing and traveling on their own after I’ve left them. They arrive to the ocean fully alive from their journey, unrecognizable from when I left them; I even sometimes imagine them earnest to be held after everything they’ve endured. The recipients of these small gifts will usually let me know of their successful delivery, and I almost appreciate that more than whether anybody cares what I wrote on them.

There’s that fucking trite phrase about “it’s not the destination, but the journey”, you know? It’s mostly annoying cuz shut up and let me enjoy whatever I choose to. In this case especially, the destination is it. And these aren’t actually sentient little turtle pups so there’s really no reason to care about their journey unless you’re a stamp collector or other type of postal service nerd. These hatchlings are all about destination.

* One of the choicest naughty words I know in Mandarin is the one for “bastard”: wan bao dan. It literally means “turtle egg” because the little things are alone in the world from the moment they’re born. 

What better way to hope for the successful arrival of little pictures and truncated sentiments from faraway places?