This project begins with a simple but open question: What makes a love letter?

It is a question I have been sitting with for eight years, ever since I discovered over sixty handwritten letters tucked inside an old medicine box in my father's childhood home in the Philippines—letters my mother wrote to him while they were long-distance in the 1990s. I encountered them almost a year after her death, and over a decade after his. I was 18, just beginning to learn what it means to love and to lose. Reading them, I understood that love is not a certainty but something patiently negotiated through time, distance, and doubt.

In the years since, I have found more traces: unsent drafts, printed email exchanges, a 1993 postcard my grandparents mailed from Montréal. Together, these form a small intergenerational record of how intimacy transforms as our means of communication do. Rather than preserving these materials as artifacts, I approach them as prompts for inquiry.

The project unfolds as a slow experiment: a simple letter-writing space where people are invited to write to a beloved—alive or deceased, real or imagined, human or not. They will not be asked to send their letters or explain them. I am interested in what the invitation itself stirs: hesitation, resistance, unexpected feeling, release. What emerges—in participants and in me—becomes part of the learning.

I expect the project to evolve rather than arrive at predetermined outcomes. It may take the form of workshops, emergent art-making (collage, handmade paper, cyanotype printing, bookbinding, collective poetry), or quiet sitting with the archive I am still learning to open.

Throughout, I remain attentive to individual peculiarities—the beauty of unique penmanship, the patterns in how we reach toward one another—and to the larger questions underneath: What would we say to a beloved if it were their last day? What do we ache for? What remains tangible across distance and loss?

At its core, this is also an act of remembrance—for my parents, and for my younger siblings, who were not yet teenagers when we became orphans, and who are still in the Philippines while I am here in Canada. I want them to feel, even across that distance, that being loved remains something you can hold in your hands.