#letter 13

I kid you not but I have been trying to figure out whether you mean it literally or as a metaphor when you say you can curl your toes and walk on them. Because if you can like actually do that, how fucking strong is your body and your balance? I just came back from my Yoga class (after missing it for two weeks) and I can vouch that the things that look the easiest when someone else is doing them are the hardest when you have to do them.

I have dyed my hair once – back in 2017 in college around Valentine’s Day. I wanted to get them dyed bright red but my mom coerced me into getting a maroon sort of shade to kinda tone it down. I don’t regret it, I love how my hair looked then and even after – for the next 1.5 years the colour kept fading and giving me different shades of beautiful brown and golden and it was gorgeous. However, I don’t see myself doing it again. I don’t know what your reasons are for now dying your hair but maybe you’d like to know this study that says using hair colour/dye can increase cancer risk in women. However, here I will spill some interesting thing I’ve learned lately.

I work as a content creator/specialist at a marketing agency and I can tell you this – from my regress research and reading to write – there’s a study for literally everything. Everything we do or don’t do increases our risk for something – cancer, heart disease, dementia, obesity. And there are always 10 other studies that will say the exact opposite. And then there will be studies that prove something that a study proved 10 years ago wrong. Because what really is a study? It can have a sample size of as little as 50 people (yes, I’ve seen people carry on an experiment on 20 people for 4 weeks and call that a study and then say 90% people stated …. as per our recent study. So, wow, I should base my life decisions on the basis of 18  people? No, thanks!) I mean sure, some things by now are common sense. For instance, not sleeping for 7-8 hours every night is one of the worst things you can do to your body and mind. But everything else? We just have to take with 10 spoons of salt! Maybe not, because then that will lead to heart disease. But you get what I mean, right?

And oh my god this was just a low-key rant because I have been thinking about this for a while. Of course, it has nothing to do with your decision to not get your hair coloured. It just made me think of this.

About love…yes, as you said it’s about accepting people as they are and being with them through thick and thin. But that is so bloody hard! Recently, in this comedy sketch, I watched by the comedian Daniel Sloss, I heard him talk about how if someone doesn’t love you 100% like everything about you then they don’t love you! Because even that 1.11111 annoying per cent is you. Everything is you! And to love you they have to love all of it. Accept all of it, at least? Over the last one week, I came to the realisation that I am not ready for a relationship because I am not physically, emotionally or financially there yet for a serious, healthy and long-term one. And gosh I definitely want the next one to be a serious, healthy, nurturing, and long-term one. And it wouldn’t be fair of me to accept that from the other person when I can’t be that person yet. And I know, I know, it shouldn’t matter that I am fat or that I cry almost every day or that I am yet to figure out my career moves – the guy should still love me.

But how can I let someone love me when I don’t love myself? When I’m not happy with where I am and as I am. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate myself. Oh no, no. I quite like myself but I also know there’s so much to work on. So I’m going to start and maybe when I feel stable enough, I can let someone be there on the rest of my journey. Right? What about you? Are you there yet? I hope that irrespective of where you are in the journey, you can be kind to yourself and take care of yourself.

I’ve been learning Korean and I know Hindi. And you know what’s one similarity between these two languages that is strikingly different than English? The word ‘sorry’ and its use.

English – I’m sorry

Korean – Jesuhabnida

Hindi – Mujhe maaf karna

Consider this situation – You just misplaced your bag with your phone and wallet and everything else in it and I see you and I’m like hey what’s up and then you tell me about it.

In English, I may say something like – gosh, that sounds terrible! I’m sorry that happened

But in Korean or in Hindi I would never say sorry. I would probably just be like gosh, that sound’s terrible! Because in these two languages sorry is more like ‘excuse me’ or like ‘I made a mistake, forgive me’. So if I told you in Korean Jesuhabnida or in Hindi mujhe maaf karna it would sort of be like I had something to do with you losing your bag. Am I making sense or do I sound a little crazy right about now? It’s just that it’s so interesting how different languages change how we interact with others. English is a funny language. That’s my conclusion after being trilingual (almost).

So, about your grandmother, I will not say, ‘I’m sorry’ and I know you may not like when people say, that. I wouldn’t like it either. But know that I send you love and strength. It must have not been easy being the only one with her when she passed away. But at least she had you, and that’s something.

February is approaching its end. We’re officially in 2020, living this new year, this new decade. I hope if not in big, explicit ways but in tiny and meaningful ways it’s going your way and that it continues to.

Love, Nikki

PS It warms my heart to know that you’ve said ‘I love you’ the most to your family. It makes me think that you’ve had a wholesome, safe and loving home and that is just the best thing.

I wrote this letter for Alyssa basis some questions they answered. You can read the questions and their answers here. 

Guys - I have received 29 people’s responses for The Love Project - 29 days of love letters. So I won’t be accepting anymore, however, you can read other letters here.

Instant Messages In A Bottle: Letter 13

The things which are in this world are finite. Perhaps something essential, an inner fire, was removed as the fruits came through your envelope? Or maybe I do not have eyes that can see the thin sheen of beauty over the mechanical surface of the universe anymore.

Or maybe what I have done has leached the world of color, just as it has smothered the house.

All that I had gained, all that I had built, it’s… gone.

The futile cardboard skins of instant dinners have returned to the refrigerator, replacing the variety of foodstuffs and persistent salami. The stacks of books have given way to shelves of emptiness, a neat and orderly shelving of tome after tome of blank pages. The smug yellowness of the house, the oily beigeness of its air, is no longer a part of the knowing emptiness. It is simply silent.

The windows do not look out on the same gardens, or any gardens at all. There is no flickering change in the corner of my eye, no gleam of other sunlight, and in fact no weather at all.

I suspect that I may have killed the house.

Understand that I don’t know how I did it, since what I took should have never affected anything but the Night Garden. I studied the half-remembered languages that jabbed at my eardrums like shattered glass, and knew truths that hung in the thin edge between sleep and wakefulness, and above all I watched. I watched the Night Garden, devoid of life, and followed the awful knowing to the root of all judgement, where I tore it from beneath the water like a weed from the wet, grave smelling earth.

You could not filter water through me. I have something far stickier than blood on my hands.

Back to your questions.

I think that the house you have is a good place, and without the ability to reach deep into the squirming muck you have cared for it well. I think that Sabrina might be someone who can see that care, and maybe extend it out a certain ways.

When I was other people, before, there was always different context, for what made you one thing or another. When I was a little boy running through the tall grass a lifetime of dirt and oil under your hands made you a man. When I was an old woman waiting on a park bench to shake hands with death they told me I was not a woman, with no children and grandchildren to bury me, just small graves at the bottom of the garden. When I was a young woman with a brick being something other than how people see you brought down police raids and imprisonment. When I was a young man running away to join the army I told myself that at the very least I could die like a man. I have been told far more often that I don’t count, don’t fit, should not possibly want, than I have been told that everything is fine. Everything is not fine. When my soul did not match my body it was impossible for me to meet their standards, and when it did, I walked a tightrope between belonging and not.

I think neither your house, nor Sabrina, cares particularly if you don’t fit either description. Houses are defined by what they hold inside, and people should be too, except that other people get in the way.

In another life – many other lives – I have been in love. In some lives I have not. Sometimes it is a longing like an onrushing train that never arrives, and in some lives the idea of romance is like a pressed flower from far away, a known shape without scent or experience. I don’t think that one state is inherently preferable to another, but it does change your priorities from day to day.

I’m not sure that I ever think in terms of wallpaper now, but I am used to being alone, using my fingernails to pick bits of myself off for inspection, feeling as if I shed memories behind me like dandruff. So I’m not sure if I should wish you well in the process of unpeeling. Insects must shed their crusts to grow larger, but when they do, they are vulnerable. I’m not sure if that’s a metaphor or not.

Kia, I am not sure I am worthy of your gifts. Worthiness is a thing that has been bothering me recently, since I am the only thing that I know persists. If I was a thoughtless, unchoosing thing like a fern or a rock, I would not ask myself these questions, but I would also have no substance other than existence.

When I pulled the root of the night garden up I could feel the technicolor scream in my teeth, sour and frazzling, leaving a fuzzy scum like sweet mold on strawberries nestled in the back of my skull.

I wanted to go on existing as myself. I wanted there to be no more doors. Ethics constantly poses a question of, would you choose to kill a single stranger to save a crowd? It ignores that we constantly make these choices every day, in thousands of small ways, consuming that which lives to sustain ourselves and telling ourselves that making a living is a zero sum game. A thousand tiny chips that lead to death long after we are gone, that pull the color from the world around each other, that tell us each that we alone are the chosen who deserve all things.

I thought I was going to stop the doors from liquefying me, from overwriting another life to insert me into the recently vacant flesh of another human being. I have been so many people. What would they have been without me arriving, full of doubts, to twist the doors into the soft smelling earth where they grew, like a corkscrew of nonexistence? Kia, I might be a ghost. If I am, I’m a ghost who wants to stop possessing people, a ghost who needs to find rest. I am solid when I beat my fists against the walls, when I carve marks into the wood of an interior door that goes nowhere but into the hallway outside, and I have to assume that like you, I am real.

But I am not a person. You say that I am me but I don’t know which one I am, or if I am something born to move from shell to shell with no identity of my own.

From the moment I set foot in the night garden to tear out the root of knowing things began to go wrong, and I understand less than I thought I did. The gardens are gone. My house no longer listens. The sky is grey and whistles with emptiness as my lungs try to consume it, and I know that this is not the only terrible thing that I have done in the name of continuing to exist. I stepped a long time ago over the edge of the gravity well and dissolved into the interstellar scream of light.

The world is peeling around me, and if I don’t stop it…

Every time I turn around I fear that I will see a door.

***

Lucy? A childhood swing set. Feeling the wind caress your hair as you swing higher and higher. Childhood dreams. It might be time to revisit the things that brought you joy as a child.