Hide numbered notes before you leave on a trip
One note per day you'll be gone, numbered and hidden — so the days apart have something in them besides your absence.
eric has done this
You leave Monday and get back Friday. The goodbye is at 5am, the week is a series of hotel-room phone calls where everyone is tired, and the person at home is doing the whole job alone. A text that says thinking of you arrives in a stack of forty other notifications and does about as much work as one.
What you need
- Index cards or small notepaper — one per day you'll be gone.
- A pen. Handwritten is the whole point; a printed note is a different and much smaller gift.
- Ten minutes the night before you leave.
Do this
- Write one note per day of the trip. Number them — 1 of 5, 2 of 5. The numbering is what turns notes into a countdown.
- Keep each one specific and short. Not I love you five times — one concrete thing each: a memory, a thing you noticed last week, something you're looking forward to on Saturday.
- Hide them somewhere that day's routine guarantees they'll be found: the coffee mug, the car's cup holder, inside the book on the nightstand, taped inside the medicine cabinet, in a lunch box.
- Text on the morning of day one only, to say the notes exist and there are five. After that, don't manage it.
- If it's for kids, put the number big on the front and let them hunt.
What changes
Five small moments across the week that you're present for without being there, and a countdown that ends when you walk in the door. You'll know it landed when they save them.
Works the same for a grandparent going into a hospital stay, or a kid at camp — write the notes into the suitcase instead of the house.
