#letter 9

You have absolutely no idea how much restraint it took me to call you ‘O.’ and not ‘Just O.’ since you answered for your name - Just O. is fine. Lame, isn’t it? But recently I have been realising why the older people get the lamer they seem – it’s because life is hard and if you don’t find tiny, silly, goofy ways to make yourself laugh and smile, you’d forget how to not be miserable. Damn it, Nikki. That’s such a sad note to start this letter on. To change that up, shall we talk about the colour blue?

Thank gender roles (not) but until I was in college I never quite paid attention to the colour blue. Pink, of course, was my favourite and I loved black, gold, silver, yellow, red, purple and even orange! But I never once considered blue because very early on as a child I had rejected that colour since it was for boys. Yes, societal conditioning can fuck you up in ways hard to fathom. But thankfully, I grew up and started to take notice and once I did I couldn’t stop. So, I totally understand when you say that you adore blue everything. It is such a beautiful range of colours – sky blue, teal blue, aqua blue, cobalt blue, Prussian blue and so many more soothing and gorgeous shades! That’s also why the Starry Night by Van Gogh is my favourite painting. Never have I seen multiple shades of blue used together so brilliantly!

(Classic) Blue is also the Pantone colour of 2020 and they say:

Instilling calm, confidence, and connection, this enduring blue hue highlights our desire for a dependable and stable foundation on which to build as we cross the threshold into a new era.

Irrespective of who says what I do believe that shades of blue, like the sea and the sky, are glorious things we humans are blessed with! And yes, I did want to dye my hair electric blue at one point. Did you?

The kind of love you described… Love is when you look at someone and you want to smile and you feel better just being around them…I felt that as a young teen and then never again. Is it possible? I cried last night after watching one of my favourite spoken word performances - When Love Arrives - which I highly recommend you to watch if you haven’t before. It made me cry at the end because I thought – is it possible to lose our ability to love and be loved in a romantic and pure way after we have had our heart broken so brutally? Of course, rationally I know it is and I have seen that happen with other people. But emotionally I feel like that won’t be the case for me. Yet, reading your answer made me smile and also thinking that you have felt that or have the ability to feel that – it makes me so happy.

And that brings me to the night you spoke about…I have been having quite a few of those lately. So I know exactly what you mean. I think about the boy I dated 5 years ago. Of the man who sexually abused me 9 years ago. Of the girl who called herself ‘my person’ but ghosted me when I needed the most. And then I break my heart further because still being affected by these things makes me feel like I’m beyond redemption? Like no matter how much time passes by these things will always matter and these people’s memories will always hurt. But I’ve learned this thing last year that I keep reminding myself – don’t have feelings about your feelings. Feel the way you want – it’s not really in your control in moments like these – but for god’s sake don’t feel shitty, or hopeless, or guilty or embarrassed of whatever it is that you’re feeling. Another thing I would like to tell you regarding this is that healing is not linear. And this quote to help give perspective:

“I’ve learned that this world is not linear, and neither are you. You could move back and forth and circle back to the same place you started but that doesn’t mean you failed. You could come back to the same place hundreds of times but you’re not the same person, are you? Sometimes you go back to the same person or the same place but everything looks different. It looks wiser and smarter and more careful. It looks clearer than before and you see things you never saw the first time. And who knows, perhaps that’s what it was all about in the first place.”

You know reading about the last time you felt absolutely loved warmed my heart and made me think of this thing my friend and I do. Ever since we graduated college in 2018, adulting has hit us hard. We are busy and dealing with a lot of shit. Whenever we do manage to meet or talk on call, we usually start by talking about the happy things and literally just sharing moments that made us feel good/loved. Thank you for sharing yours. Shall I share one in return?

It was 29th December and my school friends and I had gone on a mini road trip to a tiny beach town. We reached there in the afternoon, checked in, freshened up and left for the beach – a ten minute walk. The moment we entered it felt like we entered a magical realm where nothing worldly can bother us. The distance from the sandy shore to the sea was about a 3-minute run and one of my friends just began running towards the sea. And then so did we. We were in the water for about thirty minutes. Falling when the waves knocked us down but giggling anyway. Not seeing it as the waves vs us but as though the waves were playing with us, accepting us. We saw the sun set and knew that this was the right way to end the year, the decade.

Life is just that right – the happy and the sad interwoven in a way that it becomes hard for us to know what to expect what when. Or to cut off the sad because in the process we may just cut out the happy too. It’s kind of like a braid. The only way to get rid of it without unbraiding is to cut it off. I mean sure, you could try to sit and unbraid the happy from the sad but life is short and this pursuit seems wasteful. As long as we have some people who love us and who we love, I think we can take it. We can take the good with the bad.

Love,

Nikki

PS I think the person I have said the most ‘I love you’ to is my mom.

Guys, February is 29 days of love letters. I’m writing love letters, as part of The Love Project, and if you’d like me to write one to you, drop me an email at [email protected]

There are 7 more spots left, and you can still be a part of it if you’d like :D

My dad’s place, the living room

Hi Rose,

You might have a point there, but I just can’t get myself to say that to my dad. Besides, I don’t think saying it will change it. If anything it will only make my dad feel worse, and that’s the last thing I want to happen.

I do hope my mom will come back from Canada soon, because I miss her very much now, it’s been over two weeks since I last saw her and she is not a very regular letter writer (as opposed to you).

It’s a pity that you don’t want to switch brothers, because I really want to after the stunt James pulled this morning (though I would not oppose to kicking him out of the family entirely either). I was calmly cleaning up my dad’s breakfast after he left for a work emergency when I got a letter from him.

I didn’t know it came from him at first because he used one of the Hogwarts owls, otherwise I would have been more careful while opening it. James must have sensed that, hence the unusual owl. I expected some payback from him for the howler I send, but I had never imagined he would be as petty as he was.

In line with my criticism on the colour he’d chosen for his prank the content of the letter was a giant stink bomb filled with pink paint. It exploded in my face so hard that I wasn’t just covered in paint but in seven pretty deep and hellishly painful paper cuts from the envelope too.

It took me the entire morning and a large junk of the afternoon to get the kitchen clean again. I even had to cancel on tea with grandma and grandpa, because I didn’t want my dad to come home to a pink kitchen. It was nasty paint too, magic didn’t work on it, not even our cleaning potions did anything.

I felt like a housewife from the fifties as I wasted my day away on my knees on the floor. I got rid of everything halfway through the afternoon though, which was a good thing because the cleaning stuff I used smelled like crazy, so the kitchen really needed to air out for a bit.

It was the first time I was happy to receive a message from my dad that he’d be home late. I burned some potatoes on purpose while making dinner to hide the remaining part of the smell and now I am waiting for my dad to come home while watching the telly.

I hope you are doing okay, I hope my favorite brother isn’t dead (though really I don’t see James as brother anymore now. This so called “prank”took it several steps too far) and I wish you luck with the trivia quiz. Please send me this engrossing book once you’re finished, I’d love to read it.

With love,

Lily Luna Potter

Ps. Feel no need to kill James, I vented out all my anger to Victoire and send my “help my brother is an asshole” sentiment to Neville, which I think should do the trick. Let me know if it doesn’t though, because then I won’t hesitate to tell both uncle Charlie, uncle Percy and if need be also uncle Fred and uncle George. I didn’t want to do that straight away though, because I want some leverage for later in the year.

Pps. Let’s just stick to my mom and Luna instead of my moms, because I don’t see Luna as a second mother now and I don’t think I ever will, however sweet she may be.

Ravenclaw tower, 

first year girls dorm

Hi Lily,

What do I think? I think that you should stop saying that you are not enough reason for your dad to come home early and I think he needs to man up. Before a divorcee and single sad sucker he’s your father and he ought to remember that. It’s not your job to keep the flat cozy and clean, it’s his.

I get that he doesn’t feel very happy right now but neither do you. I heard from Albus that your mother is coming home soon, so then you can discuss all of this with her. I’m sure she knows better how to deal with it then I do.

Talking about Albus, he had the brilliant idea to ask Neville what photosynthesizing means about two hours ago. He still hasn’t come back, so I guess he became the victim of one of Neville’s famous over enthusiastic lectures. R.I.P.

And I had to call my brother an “it” otherwise you would have guessed it right away, but though I love you very much I am not switching. Hugo is mine! Or at the very least James is yours, though right now he doesn’t look like he wants to be anyone’s. That howler kind of made him look like an ass in front of his friends, and when you add the detention to it you can see why he’s been sulking for the past few days.

Molly is planning to break him out of detention tonight though so don’t feel too bad for him. Oh and I must tell you, the stories James has been telling us about Molly are definitely true. She might be named after our grandmother and have our most boring uncle as dad but she is more mischievous then uncle Fred and uncle George put together.

Only yesterday she blew up the toilets in the sixth year Ravenclaw dorms because one of the guys who sleeps there was rude to her best friend, and somehow she managed to blame it on the guy himself. He’s gotten two months worth of detention and a lifetime ban from the potion supply room. Our common room did smell like shit for over an hour but his face was totally worth it. She’s awesome.

And you know who is awesome too? You are, for writing so regularly and keeping me in touch with the home front. It helps with my homesickness and also I miss you terribly, but the letters make me miss you a little bit less. In a positive sense. I think I need to go to bed, it’s been nearly two hours since midnight. I was reading the name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss and got carried away.

Anyway I hope you have a nice day and say hi to your mom and Luna for me! (or should I say moms now? This divorce thing is making shit stuff complicated.

With love and yawns (more yawns then love by this point),

Rose Granger-Weasley

Ps. You NEED to get a dog. If not to cheer your dad up then at least to get you outside more often. Otherwise you might start looking like a Malfoy.

I guess it’s partially my fault that I lost you. I let myself get too deep into something that wasn’t good for me. Falling in love at 14 wasn’t the worst mistake of my life; she treated me well. It was after she and I’s good riddance that he found me, alone and broken. I was dumb enough to let him in because I thought no one would ever want me. I didn’t mean to lose you. It’s safe to say, in 11th grade, I let him take you from me. I thought I was in safe hands, but it wasn’t until we were alone in his car that I realized that I had made a mistake. That entire week was comprised of him picking you off of me; he couldn’t get enough, and eventually I didn’t have enough to give. I broke it off when I came back home. When he threatened to burn my house down, I realized that you were something I could never get back. I put my heart in his hands and he was too young to know that I was so fragile. To this day, no matter how many relationships I go through, I want nothing more than to have you back. All I have is the shell of the sweet girl I was before I decided to leave my heart with a man.

I’d wondered if it would feel different writing to you after meeting. And now I have my answer. Yes. It does. Of course it’s a little bit sad now, but more than that, it feels…real. I’m not sure if that makes sense. But now that I know the man behind the letters (intimately, even), it makes the exchange even better.

I hope you’re all settled back in. But just to make the transition a bit easier, I’ve sent cookies. Remember that boyfriend privileges entitle you to an extra helping. Whether or not you divulge that information is up to you. Code Name: Cookie. But if you do happen to tell the rest of your crew, I’m curious about their reactions.

Going back to work has somehow managed to become both harder and easier at the same time. I think it’s always difficult to return after time off, no matter how much I love my job. Only this time I get to bring back the exciting news. I have a boyfriend. I’m aware that makes me sound like an adolescent. I just don’t care. I’m excited and I want the people around me to share in that happiness. I don’t think I’ve told you about my best friend Rachel, have I? She’s particularly interested. So much so, in fact, that I wouldn’t be surprised if she wrote to you herself. She’s…what’s a good way to put this? Very protective.

I’ve gotten in touch with Penny, and though I haven’t told her the development yet - I wasn’t sure you wanted the information getting back to your troop - I did make plans to bring her into the city for a day of pampering at the spa. I thought she could use it. And maybe I can pick her brain about ideas on how to make the distance bearable.

I miss you already. But we’re not going to dwell on that. Because I’m a firm believer in focusing on the positive. And there is a lot of positivity right now. For me, I’m back in the beautiful city of New York, the weather is beautiful, I have a great job, and the world’s cutest boyfriend. I would also tell you that I have half a chocolate cheesecake in the fridge, but jealousy is really no way to start off a relationship. I will tell you that Rachel made it, so it’s vegan. Not so jealous anymore, are you?

Now it’s your turn. Tell me about your positivity. And include the camouflage pants. They make your ass look great.

That seems like the perfect place to end. No pun intended. I’ll write again soon. I miss you. Be safe.