300 Love Letters

One of the letters in the “crush” category.

300 Love Letters is a project of Asia Wong, who explains…:

So I’m telling this boy, one of the boys that lots of these love letters are to, about this project. “I’m writing three hundred love letters and sending them to strangers. The letters are going to be glued to the outside of the envelopes, so that the mailman, and presumably whoever the recipient lives with, will be able to see and read them. The letters aren’t to the strangers, they’re to people I know.”

The boy looks at me. We’re walking around, after work, deserted streets. He says, “I don’t understand. Why are you doing this?”, and I answer vaguely, talking about crossing space and the kind of intimacy that I believe is lacking from our society. And I’m left thinking: Is this project complicated or simple, idiotic or interesting?

It turns out that there are actually 400, not 300 letters. Once again, I’ll let Asia do the talking…

When I got to 300, I re-read my explanation and I was unsatisfied. It felt like it was only within the last hundred letters that I had started really writing to strangers, acquaintances, family, it felt like I had just started getting to the hard part. So in a month of no lovers (well, nothing serious) I wrote another hundred letters, felt better about what I was doing, finished the project for real.

The user interface of the site is a giant field of coloured squares. Clicking on a square will show you a letter. The colour of the square indiciates the type of letter associated with it:

• red and pink ones are addressed to lovers
• orange ones are fan letters
• yellow ones are for strangers
• green ones are for acquaintances
• blue ones are for friends
• purple ones are for crushes
• indigo ones are for family
• brown ones are for people she doesn’t really like
• gray ones are for anyone
• black ones are for everyone
• white ones are for her
• flesh ones are for her dream lover

The letters make for some fascinating reading. If any of you need a Cyrano de Bergerac to assist you in writing missals of love, lust or infatuation, you could probably find a letter in the collection to use as a starting point.