A letter

Dear anybody,

I’ve gotten into a habit of writing letters to the people who mean the most to me, and this one’s for you. I apologize for only getting to writing this earlier today, but you have to understand that I’ve been busy. I was stuck doing this and that, and that and this, and something else equally important that I can’t exactly remember at this point.

I’ll be the first to admit that being busy isn’t much of an excuse as far as excuses go. Everyone is busy nowadays. Everyone is stuck sifting around in some infinite mist trying to find miscellaneous objects that give us meaning. A job. A partner. A baseball league; we’re all caught in an endless storm.

I’m no different. I look back on these past few weeks and I’m not even sure what I was busy with. I’d like to say that I was out living a full, reciprocal life, the one I’ve been invited to live; but when I try to muzzle out the words I lived from a rickety jaw or when I try to type them through rigid fingers, I am instead left with a gnawing feeling of emptiness that grows with each passing moment I grow. I don’t remember life; I remember the myth of it. The pursuit of it. The quest for that fleeting moment when I will be able to sit down and look at everything I did and everything I didn’t and justify both to myself and say Ah what a life I’ve lived. It can hardly be written down.

But here I am, writing about my life. Much of it is a mystery to me, as most lives are. Moments are remembered as blurs and days are remembered even less than that. My memory is a map scattered in a tornado and I’m trying to find the pieces.

Here’s what I know right now: I was born unaware to anything on March 20^th, 1992. I gained consciousness when I was four. I’ve grown physically sometime in between then and now. Emotionally, too. Maybe. I cry less, but I think that my tears just take other forms now. These words are probably one of those ways.

I started writing – I mean really writing – when a girl and I broke up and I needed to tell someone, anyone. So I told myself My heart bleeds these pages in a little journal, then a blog, then poof, here we are two years later and I’m still trying to stop my heart from oozing out blood.

It’s mended, that’s for sure. And I’ll agree that the vigor behind my writing has slowed considerably since that first day I decided that my thoughts were too heavy for my brain. But every once and a while I write something and I hope that someone will read it and say this was written just for me even though I’m already long dead and forgotten and lost except for my finicky, smudged, silly little words that meant something to someone at sometime.

You. They meant something to you, my special someone.

And if they don’t, that’s not too bad. I’m sure I’d like to sit down with you and talk about things over a beer or coffee or whatever. I’m sure you have lots to say. But until we do, I hope this letter will suffice because I’m a clown with a hand-grenade, waiting for the boom.

Why?

Because I’m stuck sifting through funny business, and I hope that as time ticks on, and I convince myself that one activity is worth wilting away for instead of another, you find my red-nose all blown-up and shredded, and you write a letter to me. That’ll make it feel as if my time here, however short and however stunted, will have mattered, if not to me, then at least to you.

Warm regards,

Kacper