Hey, Hurtlers, Emily Abadi popping in with another installment of five-minute Friday from Hurtle. As you know, on five

minute Friday, I tell a story. I offer you a thought prompt to take you into your weekend and then

give you my highlights of the week, things that I thought were cool, whether they're awesome

things that businesses are doing, content picks, podcasts, shows to watch,

movies to see, articles to read, you name it. It's kind of crazy when I take a step back

and realize that we've been doing this social distancing, stay at home, quarantine situation

for almost two months now.

I said to someone today that I know it's hard to see it this way,

but I feel like it's been a really unique opportunity to slow down and reflect a lot, right?

I've been reflecting about some of the things that used to be part of my routine that aren't now.

And that includes traveling.

So on that note, when I was a senior in college, I started dating someone that was in the military.

We met about a month before he deployed to Afghanistan.

It was his second tour.

It was a really difficult time,

of course, for him, but also for me worrying about him as an infantry guy, living by my

cell phone, hoping to hear from him at any minute, 24 hours a day. That was my first introduction

to love in a romantic way, really, this feeling that a piece

of your heart is literally outside of your body. It was during this relationship that I started

writing letters, not just sporadically. I would write letters whenever I was flying somewhere on a

plane. We dated during my first year of living in New York, and this was when work travel started

to be a thing for me, and so I was on flights pretty often.

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