Winter is around the corner.
Perhaps, it is already here. I can smell it when I step outside, rotting leaves and icy mornings. I so enjoy the quiet way winter creeps up on us here, how it seems to hide in the cracks in the road, creeping out from under the hedge, slowly, slowly it rises, and the world is covered in the calm blanket of a Dunedin winter. But the seasons seem to speed up every year, until I’m blinking in flashes of blues and golds and greens and reds, faster and faster and faster and fast—
There is one constant in my world.
A dull reminder at the back of my head, leaching into the technicolor acid trip of the teenage experience.
And suddenly, the seasons do not seem so beautiful anymore.
They are dark things, lurking either side of a road I am sprinting down with my eyes closed.
One of my worst fears- though, a privilege to even have it- is that I will spend my personal infinity on the wrong things. That I will live and die in the boxes given to me. I have built up these standards of grandeur, these ideas of what I must do to have lived a full life. But those musts, those standards, were never once a true requirement.
I can climb trees, and fall from them too. I can chase my friends through the school to the great dismay of the teachers, I can throw paper darts from cliffs, watching them spiral into the grey of the approaching clouds, I can scramble onto my roof and yell at my friend across the bay.
I can love, laugh, cry, scream. And when I slowed down enough to notice, that was all I ever needed.
This speech is a letter to my friend.
On June 8th, 2019, at around 1pm, she was found dead at her own hand.
My friend, there is so much left. And I wish you would have stayed. Dear god, I wish- I wish you would have stayed.
But you are gone. She is gone. And now, I must look with two pairs of eyes. I watch everything so carefully, collecting memories like river stones. Holding them in my mind’s eye, bright autumn colours, mountains, towering buildings, animals. I smooth them and tuck them away, a catalogue of reasons I will never get to show her. She is not here to listen to my thesis on why it’s worth it.
But I realise, through my grief, through my desperate attempts to convince another that all of this is enough, that this world is bright and hopeful despite everything, I have somehow convinced myself.
And it wasn’t as hard as I thought.
I cannot tell her, I seem to have already told myself, so, there is only one left.
This speech is a letter to you.
And maybe, just maybe, if enough people listen, if enough people stay. It’ll make the empty chairs hurt a little less.
You get to be here, you get to laugh and cry and feel. You get to get your feet wet, to fuck up, to start again. You get to bite into crunchy fruit, stay up all night working on stuff, stumbling through the next day. And it is so beautiful, everything, is so stupidly beautiful. These tiny things, these little, inconsequential things, they make this world worth it.
And they make us who we are.
We are all mosaics, pieces of everything we’ve seen and experienced, sewn together by the thread of what we were, what we are. We are the heartbreaking text posts found at 3 am, the smell of wet concrete. We are election anxiety, corporate greed. We are clouds. We are our great grandmother’s tears, our dying lawns. We are street lights flicking off at precisely 7:43am. We are our world, the sky, the oceans, everything perfect and everything broken and all the shades in between. We are this messy planet, shooting through the aether in all its writhing beauty, and you would carve yourself out of this artwork?
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
origamiaround
2087
