One Day

So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. 

--David Nicholls, One Day 

I had felt like Emma. "Composing" is the right word, if not the only word, to describe how I wrote letters to him. I wrote them thoughtfully, proofread them critically. I was the soi-disant poet-master of composing those "long, intense letters." They were smart, funny, expressive. You could tell I loved him. They were just so good. And what I got as replies, after hiatuses of three or more business days (as if he were FedEx-ing his emails), were several lines of objective, general pieces of irrelevant fact. There was not much feeling. Or was there? Did I fail once again to discover the hidden meaning underneath "I just got back home from Rome"? I had weighed every word, punctuation, emoticon, line break and still I could not understand him. He was fleeting me. His emails were so short that I memorized each one. I recited them to my mother, and afterwards she'd look at me in this incredulous, vicarious, sympathetic disappointment and ask, "That's it?"