Sealed With a Kiss
I completed another trip around the sun recently. Birthdays have always been a period of reflection for me the same way I imagine New Years is for many others. I look back at how far I’ve come. I compare myself to all previous versions and to all the versions I’d hoped to become. It’s pretty rare to find myself exactly where I’d imagined or expected, but it’s pretty often that I am still pleasantly surprised with the results of the unexpected turns along the way. I can truly say that I did not expect to find myself here, poring over the love and letters of my grandparents far past, this time last year.
Getting access to the letters my grandmother, Veazey, penned my grandfather, Kay, while he was deployed during World War II felt like an accident. Accident or otherwise, these letters have occupied my thoughts for months on end. I started taking notes, researching other sources, getting in contact with relatives and Army captains, and writing about it all. In the past few weeks, on my birthday actually, I was able to get access to a complimentary set of letters: the ones Kay sent Veazey.
This is a process. My uncle, the one with the proverbial gold mine, carefully sorted through the tubs of thousands of letters between his parents, searching for dates central to my project. He mailed a ten pound box of these documents to my mother, who is painstakingly scanning and photographing them all for upload. Only then can I, the lone expat, view them from my perch nearly 4,000 miles away. While it is a multi-step process that seems a bit overwhelming at times, few things have made me feel more patient or grateful than these letters.
At the time of their letters, phone calls were expensive and even calls within the same state could be considered long distance. Overseas calls, especially during the war, were unheard of. Letters were the only form of regular communication available to my grandparents in the early 1940s, and it was called ‘snail mail’ for a reason. Even while Kay was stationed at Fort Jackson, just one state south of where Veazey lived, letters took about a week to arrive. Conversations that could today be had in minutes had to take place over the span of a couple weeks. The waiting period doubled for international mail, and then doubled again when the backlog of mail coming in and out of the front lines reached extreme proportions.
Letters were a lifeline, an emotional tether stretching across thousands of miles of uncertainty. Every word they wrote had to bridge the silence of waiting and the weeks of wondering if their last message had even reached the other. There was no instant reassurance, no way to hear each other’s voices in real-time. Only ink and paper could serve as tangible proof that the other was still there, still waiting.
Distance has a way of reshaping intimacy, romantic or otherwise. It makes the mundane mentions of meals, weather reports, and casual jokes feel weightier, more intentional. When I was away at college, thousands of miles from home, my mom would send me “ghost hugs” over the phone, a way to bridge the physical gap between us. In my opinion, it’s the natural successor to sealing letters with lipstick kisses — proof that love always finds a way to be felt, even across great distances.
The letters between my grandparents are not without those lipstick kisses, but they are a bit rare. The way in which most of these letters were sent, through “V-Mail”, meant that the recipient received a scanned and reprinted version of the original letter. Veazey even mentions once or twice that she prefers the other letters, the ones not sent on special stationary to be reprinted, because she likes knowing that he once held the paper she’s holding. There’s something a bit more intimate about it, especially considering it was their only form of communication for just over three years. I imagine the same thing goes for letters sealed with a kiss, that the connection feels stronger when the lipstick rubs off on your finger as opposed to on the printing press.
After finding a letter with a bright, unprinted kiss stamped on the envelope, I started to wonder if this was a practice reserved for women. I wondered because on this particular letter, the kiss was placed over the recipient’s name, not the senders. Why would Veazey kiss her own name when receiving a letter? Regardless of any kind of justification or explanation for the behavior, the reality is I do not know who exactly kissed this letter and I have no way of knowing because there is no one I can ask. There’s a possibility that Veazey was thrilled to finally receive a long awaited hand written letter and kissed the same envelope he’d packed himself. On the other hand, I can’t discount the possibility that Kay may have planted it there himself. While lipstick in general is typically associated with women, it’s not unheard of for men to don a nice shade for the specific purpose of sending a kiss in the mail.
I think those of us thinking about this in modern day have a hard time imagining men putting on lipstick to send kisses home, especially these men. We as a society have spent the past several decades glorifying the combat soldiers of WWII as a sort of peak masculinity. I mean, there were no female combat soldiers because gender roles were still in full swing, and the United States was very much united behind their “Boys in Blue”. They were seen as fighters, protectors, and providers, even from abroad. At the same time, I think we take these qualities and see them as impossible to co-exist with anything remotely ‘softer’. These men fought, but they yearned for words from their loved ones. They protected us from the growing Nazi threat, but they also wrote sappy poetry to their partners at home. They provided financial stability to their dependents at home, but they also provided locks of hair for their partners to keep.
In this case, I don’t think women were the only ones to mail their affection in the form of a colored and waxy kiss. I won’t pretend to know the exact logistics, but I like to imagine that it was borrowed from a nurse closer to the front. I find it harder to imagine that lipstick was a memento worth carrying amongst the servicemen, but I could be wrong.
At first, the image might seem at odds with how we’ve been taught to see these men: battle-worn, stoic, hardened by war. But why should it? Why should masculinity be a barrier to tenderness? To be clear, I don’t believe this gesture diminishes masculinity in any sense. If anything, it expands it. The idea that manhood should limit one’s ability to feel, to yearn, to express love in physical form is a restriction imposed by time, not by truth. War did not strip these men of their humanity. If anything, it made their need for connection all the more urgent.
In a war that demanded unwavering strength, these small, sentimental gestures reveal a different kind of resilience — the kind found in tenderness, in longing, in the quiet refusal to let love be diminished by distance. The same hands that held rifles also held pens, pressing words onto fragile sheets of paper that would carry their voices across an ocean.
The lipstick-stamped letter reminds me that masculinity is not, and has never been, as rigid as we often make it out to be. These men were soldiers, but they were also human. They fought battles, but they also wrote poetry. They stood firm in war, yet softened in love. And perhaps, in the barracks, a cheap tube of lipstick made its rounds, passed between men who longed to send something more than words back to the women waiting for them.
The war may have been fought with weapons, but these letters prove that it was endured with love. That love was scribbled between the lines, sealed in envelopes, pressed onto paper in waxy red reminders that even in the darkest times, there was still something worth waiting for.
It’s easy to get lost in history, to analyze events and their broader impact. But in the end, history is made up of people: of yearning hearts, of ink-stained fingertips, of men willing to borrow lipstick just to feel a little closer to home.
And that, I think, is worth remembering.
