Returning home after an exhausting day, I open my letterbox to find a colourful creature on a thick white postcard. There is a short message with jumbled letters on barely erased pencilled lines: “Happy Birthday Minoli nenda”. (Nenda is aunt in Sinhala.) I put down my bags and breathe.
As I move around the world, postcards have become a way to tell people I love that I’m thinking of them. It’s not a picture that I post on Instagram Stories that disappears in 24 hours, or a WhatsApp message that gets lost among the many notifications. A postcard is tangible. It is real.
