My Persona Project

As I was sitting in the back seat of my friends car, the radio covering over the sounds of my two friends talking. I was thinking about how I was likely to not get a gift that I asked for from a friend. She had told me that she planned to leave the state, and I asked her to send me letters. I have never had a true pen pal, and I would have loved getting letters of her and her travels. She started dating an ex-boyfriend again, so it is unlikely that she would be allowed to send letters, postcards and poems even if she wanted to.

While I was trying to figure out how to put a platonic spin onto something that could be considered an intimate act, I thought up the idea of making a persona and sending the letters.
Example:

Dear Maryanne,
These winter months have been hard on me. Not last week I watched as my friend, Niel Tailor, die of a gunshot wound to the stomach, I had carried him from the front line and got him to the medic tent. They sent me back to the battle, but we were soon forced to retreat. I sat by his bedside, they were unable to remove the musket ball. While he struggled to breath I wrote a note to his wife and their unborn child, he confessed his love for them. When the note was to his liking, he looked me in the eye and told me that he was glad that he would be able to see his father again. I have never met a human that was so ready for death, not because he no longer wanted to live, he had just come to terms with the fact that he was not going to anymore.
When this war is over, with your will, I plan to ask your father for your hand. I can think of no women that I would rather hold when the sun goes down, I see no other hands holding mine, no other breast to feed our children, no other watchful eye to raise them.
Your dearest, Malcolm


It was at that moment that even portraying someone that had long past died, or never existed, would still be an intimate exchange. As that is why letters are written, some bound between to people have allowed them to take time out of their lives and write to someone they no longer see on a day to day basis. The world of cell phones and text messages has dampened this true exchange of the human character, another wondrous thing to fall to the more convenient counterpart.

I then decided that this was an idea that should not get shelved even though the intend purpose can not be carried out. So I call it the Persona Project, which seems to be the name of some stupid resume building computer software. So if it does reach a meritable* level the project will have to be named NK's Persona Project, assuming that those that made it meritable, both got the idea from me and want to give me merit for thinking about it, either way I plan to us it when my friends get together.

NK's Persona Project

-Decide a person that you want to write as and write notes back and forth with a friend that would enjoy doing the same.
-Write the note as close as you can to the person that you are trying to be. If you have chosen a person that actually lived, try and see if you can find notes written by that person and write your own notes about things that they** did not write on themselves.
-Enjoy
-Repeat steps one through three


-NK

*the spell checker is telling me that meritable is not a word, that is a tangent I could talk about all on its own.
**for political correctness, I am stretching the literary guidelines for he/she. I know my they (pl) refers to a singular person.