a collection of words

Hi! It’s your favorite sophomore. (Or so I hope.) Your final exams are in a month, and after that I don’t know if you’ll care enough to come to morning choir anymore, and I’m scared of what I’m gonna do without you.

(Oh shit. Fuck. I’m gonna be section leader after you graduate. Shit. Fucking shit. Fuck.)

I’m gonna miss you so much next year. I’ll miss how you shit-talk the basses, and catching you doing the choreography we learned last summer at inopportune times, and you being our snarky-ass section leader, and we barely talk at school but I’m still gonna miss seeing you in the halls. You occupy a space in my life that I don’t think I’ll be able to fill when you’re gone, and that scares me.

To be perfectly candid, and I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird, but I love you. Not in the romantic way, although that used to be true a long time ago, but I love how you laugh at your own dumb jokes, and I love the way you move when you conduct a piece, and I hate the fact that after you’ve left, I don’t know how to fill all the tiny cracks you’ll leave.

When I was in a dark place, you once told me, “You are an inspiration, and you deserve every goodness.” That stuck with me a long time. It broke my brain, to be honest. I couldn’t understand why you would ever think that, and I’m still not sure I do now.  What cracks would I leave in your life? Who am I to you? Do I even want to know the answers?

I don’t know how to end this letter, which I guess is fitting given I don’t know how to end the chapter of my life where you’re a character. But just know that you are loved, and you will be missed, and while you go off to college and a career and a life, I’ll try to believe what you told me once.

Love,

a sophomore trying not to fracture

I don’t know why you’ve only come into my awareness recently. I feel like I wasted a lot of my high school experience by remaining stagnant. Maybe everyone does. I don’t really know. 

I still don’t know exactly how to approach you. Every time I think I’ve made progress, I find my way right back to where I started. There are times where I feel as though I’ve gone backwards. It’s incredibly frustrating. 

I don’t know how to identify my own toxicity. It’s so hard to recognize when you’re the problem or when the problem is other people. Am I the one stopping myself from growing?

It’s hard to grow when you don’t know who you are. 

You’re romanticized in every book and movie I’ve ever watched. I’m too attached to the idea of everything being a story, Character arcs are rarely so satisfying in real life. 

Growing is hard when the sun is obstructed. My sun is self love and it’s in such short supply. It’s incredibly difficult to make decisions for myself and not for others. I want to please people too badly and it stops me from embracing you. 

Maybe one day I’ll figure you out.

Love,

I really used to hate you. As a child I groaned and carried on whenever my dad loaded certain CDs in, aware that it meant I’d be listening to music that seemed older than time. I have very vivid memories of road trips with just the three of us. You, me, and my father. I supposed it was a strong sense of nostalgia that kept you around so constantly. 

Looking back now, I remember you with a strong bittersweetness. A constant companion on long rides, you’re ingrained in my very being. There are so many songs that transport me back to lonely stretches of americana and conversations that left long-lasting emotional impacts. 

There are a lot of songs my dad listened to that I still don’t particularly like. Usually heavy rock songs with screaming vocalists. Still, I hum along with that same sense of nostalgia for my childhood that I’m sure my dad had for the eras those songs came out of. 

I’ve never really understood my father. We never connected emotionally or in any aspect, really. For a period of my life, I rejected you because it made me feel too close to him. I resented that. I felt like embracing you was like embracing him and I rebelled against that. 

Recently I’ve regained a sweet appreciation for you, though. It’s really like connecting with an old childhood friend. The familiarity and comfort is still there, but I understand you more now. My relationship with you is a lot more independent. I can seek out the aspects that are in line with who I am now rather than who I was trying to be as a child. 

Ironic that as my relationship with my father deteriorates, my relationship with you truly comes into its own. 

It’s been interesting to redefine you for myself. 80s and 70s music is so often sold as hyper-masculine, full of sex and drugs. That’s true for various aspects, of course, but less true for certain others. There are true expressions of joy and creation. People genuinely finding new ways to express emotion through melodies and lyrics. It was a beautiful time for music and it has been so pleasant to discover that for myself. 

The music of my father is the music of fathers around the world. Our relationship is both mundane and unique. I’m forever grateful.

See you on the next playlist,

Falling into you is always a dangerous thing. You’re seductive and deceptive. You always entice me with airs of simplicity and instant relief. I fall for it every single time. I know you’re bad for me. The stretches without you see some of the best possible versions of myself. And yet every single time I let myself be swept away. 

The comfort you give me is the most dangerous part. The spiral down is always so much easier than climbing back up and my mind will always travel the path of least resistance. In some ways, you’re inevitable. The universe is full of cycles. A lot of them are good and healthy and beneficial. You help bring order to the chaos the permeates everything. But a lot of the times you are that chaos. 

I use you as an excuse to discover things about myself. Traveling the same routes leave more time for your mind to wander. The same lonely stretches of highway drag introspection along with weary tires. 

You help me see the worst in me. Something I try very hard to keep myself from seeing. It’s a double-edged sword. Acknowledging those flaws drags them into the repeating nightmare that you often turn out to be. Any introductions are immediately followed by consumption into whatever mess you’ve decided you are. 

I think I’m the only one who can see you. You’re like the creature sitting at the end of my bed in the middle of a bout of sleep paralysis. Always there at the edge, waiting to cross the threshold. You pull me down and I swirl around and around like the last dregs in a bathtub. \We do not observe each other enough as human beings. Books and movies give us the false hope that someone, anyone pays enough attention to you to notice. But no one ever does. I keep expecting someone to lend me a hand, to drag me away from you. But your suction is too strong and I don’t want to pull anyone else down. 

You get tiring. The same thoughts running in laps. And yet you don’t take a break. You never get tired even though you leave me constantly exhausted. But your familiarity often lulls me to sleep. It can be nice to know I’ll wake up to your presence once more. It can be nice to fall into something that’s very hard to break.

Til the Next Round,

I feel as though

you always get

sort of a bad reputation.

All you really do

is surround yourself with

as much dirt

as possible

which is a practice

I could see myself

getting into.

Signed,

I don’t know what it is about you, but for some reason I couldn’t help but think about killing myself. It wasn’t even a particularly bad day. It’s actually been a pretty good day as far as I’m concerned. But for some reason I sat down in my living room and suddenly thought about how today’s as good a day as any.

Don’t worry. This isn’t a suicide note or anything. It just shocked me how casually the thought entered my head. Like I said, you weren’t even a bad day. Just a bit mundane. Maybe if you’d been rainy or even unbearably sunny it would have made sense. Instead, you were snowy and a bit slow. 

I really wonder how I got here. How all of the different things intersected in my life to bring me to this moment. I’ve lived through countless other days just like you. Why is this one any different?

The past few days had been good. Nothing exceptional. I spent some time with friends and laughed a lot. Maybe that factors into it. I always like to end things on a comfortable note. 

Being myself, I still somehow managed to feel incredibly isolated. This happened last year too. I’d say it was seasonal depression but you actually blessed me with a lot of sunlight. I think it’s just that everyone is so involved in their own lives and I know I’ll always want more than they can give. 

I don’t think I took my first steps as a child only to take my last ones today. My path definitely doesn’t end here with you. I don’t think you are remarkable enough a day for me to want to be done. Not that I’m planning on anything like that either, I just find it a bit odd that if I were a slightly different person today would have been it. 

My impulsiveness often borders on stupidity but I also dislike myself too much to actively give in to something that selfish. Is there a difference though, between wanting to die and not particularly caring to be alive? 

I keep wondering. I still don’t know what it is about you that led to that thought entering my head. If I could just isolate a factor maybe I’d be able to stop it from pushing its way back in there again.

I can’t help but wonder if you’d be a significant day in the future, though. If I gave into my impulses would this become a day of remembrance? Or just another day as easily forgotten as the birthday of a friend of a friend. Dark thoughts, I’m sure, but they help. I’d rather be significant while alive rather than in death. Not that I’m making a ton of progress on either front. 

Maybe you’ll be a better day in the years to come. Maybe I’ll get married or change a life on this day in the future. I sure hope so. I’d like to be there to find out.

Until we meet again,

This time of the year is always really hard for me. It only gets worse as the years go on. I always let myself build up excitement and it’s never as good as I want it to be. The holidays always seem to be constant disappointment. It sucks a lot.

My family has no holiday traditions. My dad has estranged all of his siblings and my mother’s siblings are halfway around the world. They’re divorced and I’m their only joint child so this holiday has never been a very stable one. I don’t have any sort of structure for this holiday and I end up spending it feeling lonely and sorry for myself. I’ve built my own family through the friendships I’ve made but it’s not as though I can ask any of them to ditch their families for me during this time of the year. It’s too important. It just sucks to see the emphasis on family and hearth and home. It makes me feel incredibly lonely.

I feel like I have a lot of love to give all year round and this is the only time where I can be obnoxious about it but there are so many things inhibiting that as of late. Money is tight, friends are far away. Self-worth is at an all-time low.

I love Christmas and the spirit of giving. It makes me feel as though everything isn’t that bad for just a little bit. The lights and the evergreen. Things there aren’t enough of in the winter. It’s nice how we have a tradition of bringing life around when everything is cold and frozen. 

I’m not even a religious person. I don’t know what I believe. Still, there’s something about singing silent night with a multitude of people illuminated only by the candles we all hold that feels sacred. I love traditional christmas hymns and how beautiful they are. There’s even something to be said about the story of Mary. How a scared young girl became the holy mother. Like I said, I’m not religious but I was raised, uh. Very christian. The story of the nativity has always been strangely beautiful to me.

There are so many things I love about this time of year. And yet here I am, once again, on christmas eve sitting alone in my room. I don’t want to feel like this on christmas. I miss the way things used to be.

Sincerely,

Dear probably,

I use you a lot in my daily vocabulary. Maybe I’m just an uncertain person. Maybe I like the exit you give to everything I say. But there’s this one part that you come up in a lot and I don’t know how to make it stop. See, I’ve tried to tell multiple people this multiple times (7 I think), and every time I say “probably”. I’m “probably” bi. Even writing that sentence felt weird. I want to be certain, but my brain keeps throwing out this 1% chance. My emergency exit to the statement. Like, one day I’ll wake up and go “hey, weird” and move on? I don’t think that’ll happen, I don’t think I want that to happen, but even then I’m probably not sure. I think I just like to live in this bubble, where everything is the same. Remember when “Love, Simon” had it’s first preview? Well there was this line that I think got looked over a bit, “Maybe part of me wants to hold onto who’ve I’ve always been, just a little longer.” I think about that a lot. I think that’s why I’m scared. I know I’ve always been me and this part of me has always been me too but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way and I don’t know why. Sure I’ll probably tell more people and I’ll probably get over this and I’ll probably be more confident, but until then? What now?

I don’t want you to come. I want to be suspended right where I am on this Friday night for the rest of my life. I don’t want to move forward. I don’t want life to come crashing down, around, and through me. 

I’m so scared. I’m so scared. I’m so scared. 

I know myself. I know I can’t do this. I know I’m hiding too much from everybody. I don’t want to confront any of it. I don’t want to fail everyone yet again.

You feel like a fucking execution date or something. I don’t think I can handle where you’re going to bring me but I know I can’t stay stagnant here for the rest of my life. I hate how much I wish I could. No one understands that if it were up to me I would never move forward with my life. I’m too comfortable and I hate moving away from familiarity. 

I feel more and more panicked with every minute you creep closer. The mountain of things I haven’t done yet and the mountain of things I will never do keeps growing and growing like the world’s shittiest plant. I keep trying to block you out but then I keep missing endings and goodbyes that I would have cried over two years ago.

My friends keep telling me I’m strong. I know I’m not. This is just another thing in the long list of ways I’ve disappointed both them and myself.

Fuck. I really don’t want you to ever arrive.

God.

from,

I think I’ve somehow learned that two years is the maximum amount of time I will ever matter deeply to anyone. In my experience, passion is a cycle and two years seems to be it’s breaking point. After that point in time, you remain where you are because of convenience and familiarity. 

I’m tired of two year cycles. I’m tired of finally getting to a comfortable point only to be abandoned and cast aside for something newer and shinier. Maybe I have an inferiority complex. Doesn’t make me feel any less like shit.

Maybe two years is all I deserve. Maybe two years is the cutoff for where my bullshit finally starts affecting people in a toxic way. Maybe it’s better that no one gets to actually be familiar with me. Long term exposure to the mess that is my everything can probably be grossly lethal.

I fucking hate this two year cycle. I hate that I get my hopes up every time only to realize that I’m not ever going to matter as much as I wish I did. I hate it and I hate myself and I hate that I’m not allowed to just hate myself in peace. 

signed,

I don’t know how to react to you. I don’t know when it’s okay to be disappointed in others or how to properly express that. I feel bad for being disappointed in people but I don’t want to tell them directly. I never know what to do. 

I just feel as though I’ve become far too intimate with you as of late. People keep flaking. Plans keep changing. I understand life happens and I do my best to not react too negatively but. I get so down. 

You aren’t something that’s easy to talk about with other people. There are always assumptions of blame and the like. That’s not what I’m feeling. I feel frustrated, sure, but I don’t want to blame anyone. But how do I walk the line between disappointment and blame?

You’re heavy on my eyes and shoulders. You feel like something I’m forced to carry on my back. 

I love to be optimistic but every time I’m disappointed a little of that is robbed from me and that’s not fair. I try to live my life in a hopeful manner. I try to be positive and accommodating. That’s how I define myself as a person. Every time I’m disappointed I feel like I’ve lost a little bit of myself because I know next time I’ll be just that much less excited. 

I just feel really sad and there’s not many ways I can express this. I can’t talk to people. Misinformation and rumors start and I’ve had enough of both of those to last a lifetime. There has to be some sort of balance. Do I just stop expecting anything from anyone? That’s not who I want to become. I don’t want to be jaded and cynical. I don’t want you to do that to me.

You’re not who I am.

I don’t want you to be.

There’s a chaotic good kind of energy that happens whenever a really great band plays a very small venue. It’s almost religious. I’ve seen the same kind of tremor in people speaking in tongues as girls shaking to the sounds of an electric guitar. Two different kinds of gospel being delivered. 

A good bass line reverberates in your bones. The sound of a drum can replace the rhythm that pumps blood through your veins. 

Tonight’s music was exactly what live music should be. Fast and loud and bright. Nothing makes music more fun than knowing that the people creating it are getting as much excitement out of it as you are. I loved watching the barrier between crowd and band blend into one. It felt like we were all experiencing the exact same emotions under the glow of a badly lit bar. 

I never know what to do with my hands without a phone or a drink in them. But tonight I didn’t really care. I could feel electricity in my fingertips, crackling, reaching out for the screeching of the guitar. I felt a part of something chaotic and violent and good. I felt like I could take on the world.

Thanks for reminding me why I love going to these shows. Thank you for making me feel like a spark after a long downpour.

Sincerely,

Long time watcher, first time writer. I suppose this letter is a bit late. I couldn’t bring myself to think about you for an extended period of time. It made me too sad. 

Sadness is not an emotion I’m used to associating with you. It breaks my heart that seeing your name now immediately fills me with a sense of loss rather than wonder and admiration. That’s not what you nor I deserve. 

I don’t like associating you with tears. For the longest time you were my sense of adventure. I’d see your face and suddenly feel the sun beating down on me in the middle of an open-air market somewhere I had never been. Your show and your life were both a master class in what it truly meant to experience something. Anything. Everything.

I had such profound respect or you. Have. I hate using past tense now. You knew what so many others didn’t. I wish I could have seen the world through your eyes. Every aspect of the way you interacted with new people and new cultures shone through with the respect you had for them and their traditions. You knew the best people to talk to were old locals. The best restaurants were the ones on the side of the road. In a world of cultural appropriation you showed what it meant to appreciate instead, and I admire that so greatly about you. 

I cried for a long time when I found out. Not many things like this affect me, but how could you not? You’ve made such an impact on my life so of course this would be no exception. It was comforting to see the world mourned you, too. I think this might have surprised you. You always struck me as the kind of person who underestimated their impact on other people. It’s what made you so likable, I think. I watched your show that night and cried a bit more for the loss the world had experienced.

You led the life millions of people dreamed of. That’s what I struggle with the most. If you weren’t happy, how could I ever hope to be? I know you can’t answer me. I know this is silly. I can’t help wondering, though. I’ll always wonder what was going through your head and if it’s at all similar to the same noise blasting in mine.

I guess I should say thank you. That’s nowhere near adequate enough to show how grateful I am to you, but it will have to be. Thank you for being honest and respectful. Thank you for trying to share the beauty of other cultures with the world. Thank you for not eliminating other voices but instead using your platform to elevate them. Lastly, thank you for being a role model and an inspiration for the person I’d like to become.

I’ll force myself to try new things and think of you the whole time. 

See You In the Next Unknown Part,

Hello. It’s been a while. I’d almost forgotten how well you fit me. 

The other day I picked up my old guitar and strummed a few songs. My hands remembered how to play but my skin was different from the last time I touched the instrument. The tips of my fingers had changed and weren’t as durable as they were when I played every day. It hurt for a bit, but then my hands remembered and the hurt went away. 

I understand why you contacted me. I’m actually really glad you did. I think about you a lot. You were there at the formation of my current self and I don’t think you understand quite the impact you had on who I am. You showed me that the people I see as the most perfect are often flawed, and you also showed me that’s okay. I think you are beautifully flawed. I love that about you.

I thought the world of you back then. Thought. Think. Verbs change over time and we both did as well, but I think we also remain essentially the same. You are a good person. You formed my idea of what a good person should be. I don’t think the world would be half so bad if we all saw it a little more like you do. 

Years are long units of time and yet when separation comes to an end it somehow feels like no time at all has passed with you. We both changed and evolved fundamental things about ourselves but somehow together we’ve managed to keep the things I like the most about Us. 

I don’t feel fake with you. I don’t feel stupid, or ugly, or disinteresting, or any of the other things I feel when I talk to anyone else. I don’t feel like I’m not enough and that’s such a rare feeling. I grasp on to any singular moment where I don’t feel like that and time with you gives me those moments like a waterfall of peacefulness.

I think we might’ve shared the same soul in a past life. I think we share remnants of that same soul now. 

I hope this wasn’t the last time I see you. I hope, I hope, I hope.

Love,

I can’t really say I like you all that much but I think you’ve shaped me in very significant ways. I know in high school I strongly resented living in a place with green lawns and backyards, but you’re inherent in a lot of my best memories. 

Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, will ever beat driving through a neighborhood at sunset, windows down, screaming the words to songs with someone, on your way to some hilltop where you’ll drink something frozen and talk about who you’ll be. I’ve been a lot of places. Seen some pretty things. Nothing will ever be more beautiful than the face of someone I love framed with red sunlight and the passing blur of trees.

I like wearing sunglasses and sitting in grass. I like laying in a backyard, saying nothing. I like the way a smile tastes on my lips on a hazy summer day, watching heat shimmer off of pavement. Yeah, you’re usually pretty boring, but sometimes I think I need that. I think you can tell when someone has never watched fireflies lazily flicker.

There’s something Romantic about living behind a white picket fence and desperately wishing to be anywhere else. Longing shapes you. At night I’ll stand by a window and look up at the night sky and wish for something else, and it’s only then when I feel like I really know myself. When I allow myself to hope for the impossible. It reassures me that I’m still able to dream like a child. If I lived somewhere busier and louder, the noise might drown my wishes out.

I still think you kind of suck. You’re boring and hot. You’re boring and cold. But tedium in itself has a kind of beauty. So, thanks.

Stay Quiet,

I am intimately familiar with you. I’ve lived in you more than any house I’ve ever slept in. Is it enough to say I’ve lived in you? I am you. In so many ways I am only halfway. 

As a child stuck in the middle I kept you like a secret in my pocket. Always trying so hard to fit in, to be what everyone else was. What they still are. Only ever halfway to two different states of normalcy. One so extreme and far-fetched that living there would have shut me off from the world, the other so achingly average that it seemed an unattainable dream within itself. Still today I’m only halfway to a stable life. 

Being halfway is inherent to my identity. I was quite literally born this way. The physicality has left me desperately searching for a connection in a culture I don’t have any natural, intimate ties with. No matter which side I sit on, I am seen as an outsider. Not fully one or the other, therefore discarded by both. I feel like an imposter. A fraud. I claim an identity whose heritage is a virtual stranger.

I’m afraid of commitment. I want so desperately to love as intensely as I feel, and yet I hold back a part of myself every time. I want to share connections with people but I pull back. I can’t commit to anyone. I’m always so scared that they’ll leave. Sometimes I even wonder if it will ever be worth crossing the threshold. I’ve crossed that line exactly two times and both gave me burns. I know better now. Now you’re draped around me in what others see as a cape, but what I know to be a shield.

I know. I know I’m the one keeping myself firmly stuck in between. I’m scared. Everyone is. But I’ve let it paralyze me for so long that I’m unable to function without my safety net of mediocrity. I claim courage as a trait, but I know better than anyone that I’m nothing but a goddamn coward. I want so badly to be extraordinary. I know I never will be. But there has to be something better than halfway to normal. I’d like to say I’ll find it. I know I likely never will. I’m stuck. Just like I’ve always been.

yours (for most likely) forever,