wherever the will will go

Friend,

Letters are the most important thing I got. I know because I winced at the starving thing, rewrote it as stuff, and replaced it back with thing like a veteran army marching to war after being beaten with steps that will surely be beaten again. Then I came back to this to tell you it all, which frankly isn’t much. But it is it and they are they, things and stuff, and I am here writing to you as I have come to know and unknow in unequal, unassured measures. They too aren’t much either. They are just a few words. Here are they:

I knew you through disbelief. You showed me a magic trick, told me to be wary in what I believed in. I believed it. I also believed we might be friends because we spoke alright, laughed better, and even shared a serious concern or another. I forget them. They were not so serious now.

We weren’t friends. To assume otherwise is to forget that we forgot. For about seven months, I saw you like the other cards in the deck. Unselected and unused. Just a prop. Here we were, shuffled and reshuffled, and still no closer, still no use except for misuse from time to time. A hello, for example.

Socks brought us together. You sewed. I reaped. I told you things, or was it stuff, that I didn’t tell others in the cohort. I don’t know why. I suppose it was because I knew you through disbelief. In myself. In the surroundings. In the severity of it all.

On your birthday, I hope you aren’t serious. I hope, too, you are if you need to be. I hope most of all you don’t need me to hope for anything for you. You have that under control, I assume. And besides, I disbelieve stuff, or is it things. Hope isn’t too common for me.

What is, however, are these precious, hand-picked and worn letters. They are now yours. They were once mine. And they haven’t said what I wanted to say yet. They, like the cards, are furniture misplaced and stuck.

For what I have gotten you down here to do is to say that I’ve written letters for nine people in my life: my mother, my father, my brother, my two ex girlfriends, two friends, my dog and you. They are the most important things I got too.

Often, I fail to recognize this in my eat-me-alive-unless-I-taste-bad-and-probably-do pessimism. I miss people, preferring the company of loneliness. I miss events, preferring to sit here and think of thinking. And I have come to realize, to know and unknow, that you are important to me.

This is a trite, trivial, almost lame sentence. It has no growth. It is alcohol, dead water meaning nothing once read enough times. It is clunky, unfinished, a waste of space. And it is exactly what I need to say.

For though we don’t see each other often and though we see each other less than that, I want you to know that on your birthday, a day that I’m sure meant little to me and little to you when you were little, that you are important. If not to yourself, then to me. If not to me, then to those around.

I don’t know who those people are. In time, we may become closer and I may know these people. That’d be nice. I can talk to your Dada about Dada. Then he can show me the trick he showed you and I can disbelieve that I got this friendly with someone I didn’t know however many years ago. How the heck did I do that, I might ask.

And I’d follow a line back to magic tricks and socks and happenstance like that same army, marching, still kicking, still playing a tune that’s maimed and broken, teeth gone, spit and splattering, and I’d find you. Thank you for giving me that opportunity, Friend. Thank you for these words.

Yours, Kacper