Dear reader,
I feel the need to write to you, maybe just to someone who understands. I suppose I don't really know, will never know, if you do. Isn't that so human. I've entered new worlds in my writing, new uncoverings of my insides. New understandings of the child I forgot I was. It's a torture of a pleasure, but that is so me too. Sometimes I grow tired of considering how next to hurt myself, how sapid the thoughts would be churning me into some deviancy. I suppose, in some bizarre manifestation, I wish to belong to something that is accepting of how fragmented I feel. I don't know why society doesn't feel like that place. It is the most bizarre of our creations, and wicked too. We must be pretending so good, like how we practiced as children, to believe that this pile of atrocities is not unbalanced, wrong side up, teetering on collapse. It's like we are criminals, and our one foul deed didn't end in catastrophe, so we just layered increasingly wide stacks of malintent to see if we could build a high enough castle to rip down the heavens. Maybe it has always been this way. Maybe... my perspective is the backwards that I chastise in everyone else. How can the world feel upside down, but simultaneously feel as if it is crushing me.
I feel close, and also distant from my goals. I know soon that I will reach them and then they will be far off again. I'm celebrating how the mind takes a stick to my feelings, stirs them into an agitated ooze. In a way I am pleased, and relieved, to watch my thoughts have this incestuous battle to create something I've never seen. I had been so discouraged by the notion that all things have already been created, and I'm just reshuffling them.
And I've developed a contentment for all the people who fade from life, who've forgotten about me. That used to be a bother, an attachment, something I fought to undo. I have a way of forgetting myself, to change, but it has become difficult to forget others. Maybe that all comes with time. I'm better at ignoring people now, though that sounds sad. At some point you have to look at the world, full of takers, and say... fuck 'em. There's a saying that goes something like: we should be grateful when someone reveals their nasty nature, so we can remove them from our focus, and cultivate a family of benevolence. I still have that temptation, that I could be the reason evil changed its course. That's the grandiose in me. It wants a story of how I changed the world. I have also become better at not squeezing every last valuable taste of success from everything I do. That's the ambition in me, to take all of life and compress it into a benefit--usually selfish--but I hide that with flowery inclusive language. Kumbaya shit. I realized stories will come, and change will happen anyways, like most things do when you breathe and settle into harmonious acceptance. I used to hate that acceptance thing, too, but that is for another letter.
I suppose none of this is ground-breaking or thrilling, captivating like I'm always trying to be. But maybe you needed one of these reminders. You never know where openness might take you.
Best,
Lee
