Not long after I bought my first house, I found an old desk at a thrift store. It looked like it had come out of a hotel guest room and was destined for some sad fate. It took only a moment to decide I would be that sad fate, pay ten dollars and cart it home. With my newly acquired secondhand desk loaded in the back of my Nissan Pathfinder, I was already planning its future as a much cooler piece of furniture.

My inspiration came from a burrito joint down the street, which not only had the best jerk chicken in town, but also my favorite tables. They were dark wood with random objects—keys, stickers, marbles—inlaid in an enormously thick layer of something smooth and wet-looking. I’d always admired the tables for being shiny and entertaining and because they looked like something anyone with a modicum of creativity and craftiness could make.

Full of confidence in my own craftiness, I headed home and added a layer of white primer to the desk. While it dried, I sorted through ten years’ worth of postcards that I had received from friends and family in exotic (and not so exotic) locations. I decoupaged my favorites to the top and only after it dried did I realize I’d run into a problem. What was that shiny, smooth stuff that sealed the tables? Was it resin or shellac? Was there a difference? Where do you buy either one? Could I get the same look with a hundred coats of decoupage glue?

At the end of the day I learned that, no, a hundred coats of decoupage glue did not give me the desk I’d dreamed of. Not even close. In its place, I had a bunch of artistically arranged postcards that stuck up off the desktop and were loaded with layers of sticky, clingy coating that everything from notebook paper to laptops stuck to.

Then—as is the case with many of my endeavors, crafty and otherwise—before I knew it, it was Monday and back to work and back to life, and the desk was stuck in a corner of the room and loaded with all those things people put on desks that make them utterly useless for their purpose.

Two years later, having not wholly given up on the project, I loaded the desk into the U-Haul that was carrying my belongings from North Carolina to Oregon. For the next year, it sat in a corner doing its deskly duty of holding up a sewing machine, which, of course, was practically glued in place. At the end of that year I moved again, and this time the desk didn’t make the cut. Before giving it up to whomever Craigslist brought to my door, I decided to salvage some of the postcards. So one Saturday, with a glass of wine in one hand and a razor blade in the other, I started scraping away.

From the start, I knew who some of the postcards were from. Some were leftovers from my own travels that I was too enamored with to send. Others were a guessing game, recognizable only by handwriting or implied jokes. The decoupage, in its sticky glory, refused to let go of any of them without a fight, but after piecing together the scraps, I was left with a reprise of the last ten years in the voices of my globe-trotting friends.

Some referenced past loves or hinted at future plans (some of which had materialized, but just as many that didn’t). Some were utter nonsense and others made me sigh because they brought back memories that were so strong it was hard to believe any time at all had passed.

“I am enjoying trying to figure life out in a foreign country...I have many stories to share with you when I get home,” wrote Anne during a semester in France. The words echoed what Anne said when I’d seen her just a month before; with six-month-old Hazel on her lap, she was now trying to figure out life in the foreign country of motherhood.

Of several from my mother detailing trips she and John (my former stepdad) took, the longest snippet read: “John caught three fish—one very large that was going to be dinner until we were advised it was inedible. See you Sunday with Bear.” Bear, our faithful Cairn Terrier, had only recently been put down after 14 years, the last few—after my mom and John divorced—spent in joint custody.

A snippet from Becky, a college friend who spent a summer in South Africa, said “Can’t wait to see you even if it is senior conference + Gladys Graves” (a reference to a curmudgeonly scholarship director we’d known) made me realize I hadn’t spoken to her in years. Even when a mutual friend had passed away earlier that year, we hadn’t talked. It suddenly became clear that we likely never would.

Pulling the postcards off was a combination of watching Antiques Roadshow and that nostalgic feeling that you get reading yearbook inscriptions from the people you actually cared about in school, though undeniably more fun than either of those activities on their own. I felt like I’d unearthed some great treasure that no one had known was buried. And when I looked to another wall in my room, decorated with postcards I’d received that year—of buffalo, sea otters, Elvis in all his sequined glory—it made me appreciate the depth of my friendships and how lucky I am to have people in my life who, in this world of instant and free communication, take the time buy a postcard, write on it, find my address and track down the appropriate postage to ensure it gets to me.

The desk project was a failure by D.I.Y. standards, but I was okay with that. Over the years it had served me as well as any other piece of furniture, though not in as pretty a fashion as I had envisioned. And in the end, tearing it apart gave me more satisfaction and pride than successfully completing the project ever would have. Had it gone well, I realized as I passed the desk on to its next owner the following morning, that was something I would have missed.

Kate Griesmann is a former first grade teacher and freelance writer with a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Her writing has appeared in the Oregonian, the Oregon Quarterly and the Eugene Register-Guard.