We live in the same world. We breathe from the same air, detracted from the same sand, broken into the same sky. We like perfection. We like dreaming big. We don’t believe in fairy tales, but we’ve been told we should give them a chance. We like rules, but our own. We see the world, not in black and white, but in depth, no matter the color.
I write, not to make you happy, but to make you believe. I write endlessly and in between daydreams. I write in my dreams and my nightmares. I write when I make coffee, when I take a sip, when I have a glass of white wine. I write for pleasure and pain and bitterness and sweetness and misery and happiness. I write the way you see the world. I write to be ambiguous, but to make you think. I write without thought. I write like water that overflows in the bathtub.
My mother and father could have written the past and it would have been so much easier for me to imagine feeling what they felt. My mother could have written the entire history of her pains and losses. My father could have written the entirety of his loneliness in those five years without her. He could have written what happened to him and his children without her. He could have written what it was like to live like that, tired and shaken, broken and shattered. My mother could have written her anger and her shame, her unwritten, damaged soul.
My sister does not believe in that kind of writing; she does not believe the entire world needs to feel our losses and pains. But what if we teach people through our losses and pains? What if our memories and experiences change the way people look at pain and gratitude and forgiveness? What if our written pasts make their today different in color?
My brother writes to share what happened to him. He writes the things I want all of them to write. He writes and I cry with him sometimes. I sob uncontrollably for a past I am attached to but never lived. I read and think and pause, close my eyes, and a heavy air of sadness goes through my body. I see him when I read. I see him and imagine their life and wonder what a stranger imagines.
We all write. Some of us keep it inside, under our eyelids and lashes, inside washed out pockets and hidden drawers. Some of us are afraid to tell the world about our fears and what happened to us. Some of us only move on when we tell someone else.
I like that you and I live in the same world. I like that you like how I write. I like that you admire and cherish my thoughts. I like that you read and it never becomes too much. Or maybe I like to think that’s how you think. At the end of the day, when I still haven’t heard from you, I like to remember the past and the way we used to write, simple and uncensored, how our feelings didn’t matter, or the years that separated us.
I am done writing for the night, but I see that what I wrote doesn’t matter to strangers. There is nothing to be attached to because they don’t know you and I won’t tell them.