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I've been exchanging handwritten letters and postcards for about a dozen years, mostly with folks met on FPN. It's been a great pleasure, and never more so than now during the pandemic. My correspondents are among my closest friends (albeit geographically distant). I recently took a look at the well-worn little book I write the names and addresses of my correspondents. There are well over 60 contacts recorded there. Maybe a dozen are active now. In the large majority of cases, when an exchange stopped, I just stopped receiving replies from that person. No explanations or "last letters" were received; I usually regretted the sudden end of the thread. In three or four cases, it was I who stopped replying. I regret the times I broke off an exchange without offering an explanation. In every case, the honest explanation would have been that I didn't feel there was enough of a shared connection, enough material to write about, that would interest us both. For some reason, this seems to be hard to tell someone. One of my pen friends said he's just told folks his life had gotten too busy to allow time for letters. A white lie, he acknowledges: it's really not about time but about interest. But I give him credit for not ghosting. For myself, I've decided never again to break off a correspondence without an honest explanation. Since I'm so fond of my current batch of pen pals, several of whom go back a dozen years, I don't expect to have this problem any time soon. How do you handle this situation? Does it hurt to have a correspondence end abruptly? Do you try rekindle interest by sending another letter? Do you have any regrets about stopping writing?