Mango Season

Dear friend,

It is mango season. The wood of the door smells like it. Do you know the smell? It is sickly sweet. It is the sweetest you'll ever taste. Mangoes here aren't similies, they are metaphors. They are smelled, they are looked over and the police isn't good but the mangoes are. Sometimes my brother accelerates when there is a body sprawled across the road at 1 AM but he stops at a mango stall. The mango-seller knows the art of selling mangoes. They are piled on top of each other like pyramids on flimsy wooden stands and sometimes mangoes at the bottom of the pile are not-sweet but never bitter. There are fleas but the mango-seller whips his ragged cloth and they fly away momentarily.

It is mango season. It means the sun is high and when the temperature rises, the sweat trickles down the face of the man with too many wrinkles and chocolate brown skin. Air-conditioners feel like a lie, because the girl in the street and bangle clad wrists doesn't live inside cool air, the man on his motorbike is letting the sun seep into his skin, and somehow my skin knows that. At one point, you have to switch it off and let the air out and the hot air barges in. It is very hot here but the mangoes are sweet. My friend says her summers were punctuated by mangoes and that you could slurp mango pulp and it could be all over you and you could bleed mango and her father would take a water pipe and wash it away. I sit in my kitchen and someone offers me a mango after a fight like a peace offering and my hands bleed mango in the middle of the night. They say no mangoes taste sweeter.

It is mango season. There are a few ways to measure summers in Karachi. One: when you need a bath after every thirty minutes. Second: when you spot the mangoes on stalls. Third: with the monsoon rains. Summer is loud and ceiling fans roll like spinning tops - it is a busy season for the cieling fans. But you can sing in the bathroom because nobody will hear. There is no silence except yours. Sometimes God decides that the Sun needs a break so the clouds pillow fight and scream grey and come pouring out. Some people think rain is the kind of time when you write poetry, other people pile up on motorbikes and drive away to the seaview road and find the beach where they find more water. Some people stand in their doorways and update their statuses and some are grumpy because they don't understand why everybody is excited about rain. There are no rules here. You just are. Teachers form human barricades to drag students into corridors from the open ground so they don't go wild in the rain but when the bell rings for the last time in the day, armies and armies of girl come thumping down the stairs in Viva la Vida fashion, and there is a noise, it is a "Whoo!" and a "Haa!" combined. It is nothing and it is everything and it is chaos just because it rained. But there are flip sides. There are sides of the story when water stalls in the street, the transformers explode, the ceilings fans dawdle into lifelessness. The electricity leaves and somebody shakes their head with a resigned sigh. The next morning the water will stand still, you have to roll up the windows because someone will zoom ahead and splash water all over you. There are sides to the story when you are reading in the glow of an emergency light for your entrance test because there is no electricity, there is no generator, and the silence is dead because the water still stands and the car engine died and your grandmother is at the hospital. There are bad times. There are good times.

It is mango season. I can mark the calender with the kind of drinks blending in the blender. At first it is lassi, sweet and frothy, complete with a white moustache across your face. Then there are juices made out of unripe mangoes and then mango milkshakes and then the moustache across your face is yellow. The sunset is dressed in Khaki, the clouds always form a different pattern and the heat dies down at five-o-clock, now you can feel the wind. We are not silent. My city is ridiculous. Humour is plastered across phrases at the back-side of a rickshaw. It says, "Ab ham kidhar jaein?" Where do we go? June-july is said together, like a couple, married by sunshine. I have never seen a tourist in my city, white-skin people don't stand on roof-tops and take pictures. Maybe because no one has ever seen the places like we have. Nobody except us has taken the wind for granted, because nobody except us has called the chaos of the city home. The streelights burn yellow, and on the rooftop there is always room for another poem, another letter, another song. Sometimes I like that we are alive. Sometimes I don't understand why we know the sound of ambulances better than we should have, sometimes I don't understand why people are stolen as much, if not more, than things and sometimes I don't understand why the night cripples into fear. Sometimes I find the answer in the gardener who always returns to water the flowers, sometimes I find the answer in the man who stalls his rickshaw and looks at the sun setting behind the clusters of houses somebody calls home, sometimes I find the answer in someone selling garlands at the traffic signal. At one point the garlands take up the entire stand. By night time there are only one or two left.

Love,

Me.

for a food court stranger

I don’t suppose you
write your alphabets like I do - maybe yours are alphabet domes and alphabet temples with alphabet men bending their backs in prostration -
my alphabets in my Urdu notes are curved and dotted and the alifs adorned at the top with a cape of their own because I give that to them -
but we exchange money on opposite sides of the counter and our words match because they sound similar on both sides of the border -
I don’t know if I can trace your chocolate skin to smell of spices and saris and a decade of street cricket and now we are here - polished floors and air brushed pictures for perfume ads that say “euphoria” - but for us it means something different, it means the first drop of monsoon rains and the first sight of mangoes and secret love letters that feel forbidden even inside our hearts -
the food court doesn’t smell of your amma’s favourite recipe, it is modern, it is all this it is all that and you can see your face on the slab of the counter and it doesn’t feel like our streets because no one is being ridiculous -
they give you stares at airports, did you know? i feel nervous at customs and what they have seen of our kind, when bad drives you crazy and crazy drives you bad but it would be so sad to have
become what people have thought of us -

i pledge to wonder about you, i pledge to write you letters, i pledge to think of you as a hero, the hero of your room, the hero under the blanket at night who goes to sleep thinking about childhood streets, i pledge to trace your skin back to the smell of jasmine and garland clad wrists that you fell in love with, i pledge to paint with bare air with my fingers the family portrait you carry inside your wallet, i pledge to read the book stowed away at the end of the shelf untouched for weeks or months, i pledge to find a hand and look for graffiti on walls and take a blurry photo of someone on a chingchi, i pledge to point out places in street corners and the obscure coffee shop and the bakery that looked a lot like the one in a story book, i pledge to reach out for stardust of fallen stars and the patchwork that still remains on broken dreams

because everyone can see you towering, but would you see me cowering? In an alleyway with a notebook and downsized dreams because dreams are expensive and my voice can be small - i want to hear you from miles away, the moment of making before it becomes victory, the time of your life before it becomes a memory, the memoir before death, the epitaph before you are gone - we are now, we are this, wrapping aluminium around Arabic food so someone else can have a better life - and you tear your gaze like you are not an infinity, like you do not have dreams and like the universe would ever be complete without you - how could it be? it is the universe who decides who is beautiful enough to be showcased under nights skies and sun lit days that hover above us - the universe decided on you. the universe decided on me.

isn’t the light in the nightsky from stars that have crumbled away? we are crumbling stars with fallen lights but ones that make the darkness lighter.

for the strangers of my city

dear stranger,

i looked through the crack of the window and you had let your hair down and the six o clock Karachi winds make me want to close my eyes and examine the sunshine patches on my hands and trace out the syntax of how your jaw clenches when you have bad news over the telephone and how the freckles on your nose don't give your red nose away and how you stare out at something in between cups of tea and you look down and swirl the liquid and it matches the colour of your skin -

sometimes my poems are what you were on a Wednesday morning - nightsky hair tied up into a hair bun with a red ribbon, one to match your heart. i see you on the sidelines, i write you down in words and everything that doesn't matter to you, matters to me. it matters to me how your eyes dart nervously and how the moon of last night left its traces on your starlight skin while you hold yourself and think of something and thoughts that breathe in between the surprised distance of your chapped lips -

you are the poem in my head because i write it down with how your smile digs into your cheeks and how your hair sticks out and you are the character from a book in the London rain but someone fit you into the wrong story so you laugh it out and are the girl who does not belong because her skin is too white for too much milk in her cup of tea - you glance at me in passing and i have already written you down in miles and miles of invisible ink

and i don't quite know how to deal with it, how to make you understand and grab you by the shoulder and explain to you that you are in my poetry and you are in my prose and they are both seventeen year old but seventeen means being young enough and foolish enough to fall in love momentarily and eternally with strangers and how they laugh and what they sing and how they see me seeing them

i see you, i see you - i see you right now because i asked myself what the patches of sunshine on my skin remind me of and it was you because my bones and my skin take you in and i find reasons to stay alive

so i pray to God that he takes your hand when the gravity of linoleum pride wants to take you west -i pray to God you break free, ride the wind and the wings of the sparrow someone told you were too far away, i pray to God you grease your hands trying to fix things someone said you couldn't and i pray to God that when the six o clock winds displace your hair and you turn your head slightly you find me and i am smiling and i have already written you down and prayed for you and held your hand inside my head and smiled for you in the quick moment i shift my eyes from you to something i don't quite see

love,
a friend

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

I learnt in Chemistry class that when you feed the shriveled pride of a raisin, it blows up to become a grape. And that our skin colours are different because of proteins in our bodies called Keratins and Melanins. And in history class that the apartheid was a system of racial segregation that governed relations between people with white skin and those who didn't have white skin. And something I learnt on my own was that people will find reasons to fight and one of them is Proteins.

Your Keratins and Melanins gave you desert skin. Rugged and young and beautiful. And someone else gave you a perpetual smile behind your mustache. You fix the drips on your grandfather's deathbed and shrug off any concerns with a wave of the hand and a "kuch naheen hay". It's nothing. Somebody said doctors lie very well.

My father bent over the kitchen counter this morning re-arranging tablets and they could have been a picture taken from a google search somewhere. And I looked at them and I wondered about how we find ways to stay alive even though we say we can almost taste the metal of the gun inside our mouths.

Orange eyes, tired smile, skin the colour of dusk, feet that hurt from wearing heels, sentences that curse the food that doesn't go down a loved one's throat, a math sum that you just can't figure out - everybody marches on.

A single tear ran down my teacher's cheek and she kissed a student on her head. The girl with the hole in her heart is twenty and everybody is sad about how she is beautiful but how she cannot live long. And how she could have. She hears everything sowed in the whispers and she keeps her head down low and offers to massage the old man's head. Her voice breaks when the old man says he doesn't have much time. She tells him to stop talking like that and there are tears well spent. Somebody shakes their head because she is beautiful and because she is going to die.

Aren't we all? Like McGonagall's chess pieces. One wrong move and you are in the right place and shot down one by one until the game is over. I don't know what the game is or who is playing it or why it is there but it is. I don't know why we have memories and fragile hearts and I can't tell you why because I do not know. I can only tell you what you already know. That while you continue to breathe, you live. You touch and you scar and you are touched and you are scarred and the ink that you spent all your school life staining your arms and hands with didn't seep into your blood and kill you.

You are alive and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. The fire was in the other part of the city and not yours. You only heard the ambulances and you weren't inside one. You can wonder about why nothing happens to you and why everything happens to you but you look outside and it's daylight and the day is alive for everybody. When there is no insomnia, everything falls asleep with you and you wake up and you are alive once again.

I don't want to leave you confused or sad so I will tell you that I don't know what the colour of your skin is and I don't know what you find to stay alive and who eggs you on. You are my friend because my heart breaks the same way your heart breaks. Into two. And I want you to know that I was searching for something to end this with and something came along. The six year old boy in my house came excitedly upto us to show us a kite he had pulled from a tree and it had a broken string. Everything was in his eyes and he knew he couldn't fly it but he'd found the kite. So there's that to believe that everything will come our way and happiness can be broken sometimes but we've felt it to know that is there. And there's a text message I'd send you if I had your number and it would have three words: hang in there.

Thank you for listening. 

Lots of love,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

I'm still trying to understand the day. I am still trying to understand life. I feel alright. But I think we don't remember that we've felt alright when we don't feel alright. We don't remember the day we felt invincible singing a Bryan Adams song. We don't remember these things. But I want you to know that these things exist. And I hope you find them.

I want to tell these people how important they are to me. How important it is to me when a friend fiddles around with her glasses and another friend wakes up and looks at the mirror and pulls an ugly face and says, “Today I woke up being beautiful.” I want to tell these people that it is important to me that they laugh and their smiles spread across all their skin and I laugh with them. I want to tell these people that it is important to me when I see them around college and that they help me see things. I don’t know why it is important. It just is. It’s the little parts of my day that string it together and then everything comes to life and I feel alive. 

It’s like what my teacher was saying. I think even though she loves to tell stories about herself, being alive has brought an unusual kind of wisdom to her. The raw kind. The one that’s just there. Dark-skinned wisdom. She said that when people are around, you don’t really feel it. And it’s a simple thing but then you forget you love them when they leave the door open or when they tell on you or get on your nerves. And when they leave, it doesn’t matter. You just want them there. You know? It’s a simple thing but it was so true that I didn’t want to hear it.

So many things keep happening. I love so many things and people in a secret way. Like my friend said. In a secret way that I might forget them later. But it’s just a good time. It’s a good time when someone tells me that legend has it, the Quail loves mangoes and comes back every season to sing for it. Things end but the world doesn't. A judge in an oratory competition last year looked up from his laptop screen after announcing the quarter final results and said, “Guys, this isn’t the end of the road.” Maybe it really wasn’t. 

It was strange that while we drove home, two intersecting flock of birds made a canopy over the car for a moment. They just took flight. Just like that. A prompt from the wind, a sign from the heavens. Moments like these, I just feel drunk on sunshine. There were empty plots, too, where workers were hard at work and cementing bricks or just napping for a while. I don’t know, I just like to think that this is all going somewhere. That these people are all going somewhere. Some place forward. Because a flock of birds soared high and a different flock of bird soared low. But there was still flight. And I hope we’re moving forward. I hope we don’t stay where we are no matter how alright we feel about it. Heaven is a place, after all. I like to believe that. 

And that's life today. 

Love,

Me. 

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

I am writing to you to tell you that I am doing good in life but I am confused. I am confused because I spent a lot of time thinking about how there are so many broken homes in this city and all over the world and bad things are happening out there and I don't know how to fix that. I don't know how to help fix it except promise myself that I will never let myself give in to the desire of doing bad things and maybe that isn't humanly possible so I promise that I will try. And I don't know why people think that what they do doesn't matter because it does. Every inch of it does. All the pauses in the universe and all the time we take up forming our sentences and the little seconds I start walking just a little bit slowly to see the night sky and the moon sandwiched in between two tall buildings, it all leads up to something such as now and such as today and such as the time somebody shouted at me because I was late. 

So I know the things that we do matter. And it mattered when the robber shot somebody I loved in the head and a whole house fell apart and this sombody I loved had gray hair and he never completed his last poem. And it matters when a bomb goes off in the city and everybody misses the eyes of the person who goes away. And it matters when your sister cries or your brother cries or you mom cries or your dad cries because you feel things for people you love too. And I think it's just a colossal mess and everything is a chain of events and we come somewhere in between that chain. So we matter too and when the ball is in our court, I hope that we find the strength to direct it the right way. 

There is war and there is hatred and then there is this. My hands are cold today and I am trying to find comfort in my favourite book that I bought only a few days ago. And I know that somewhere out there, there is fear and there is anguish and I am quiet in respect for that. So I'm trying to figure out how to do something that will stop another bad thing from happening and right now all I can work is right here with me, it's my own hands and my own eyes and my own stomach that sinks at the thought of other things and other people. 

So this is my life today and I live in a broken world but there's always a but and maybe that's because there are things like hope and dreams and a thing called strength to counter all of this so I will try to do that today. It's like they say, it's not over until it is. And I'm trying not to say things I don't mean, not even to a little girl so last night I just read things from her favourite book to her and she liked it. I liked it too. Things sound good when you mean them. 

Thanks for listening. I am infinitely grateful. I am infinitely blessed. 

Love,

Me. 

A Letter To No One.

Dear You,

This is a good time in my life. I am so thankful for that, you wouldn't believe. This is my favourite part of the day because there is the six'o'clock sunset I can see every day through my window and if I crane my neck I can see the Sun dip slowly. My best friend is asleep beside me and I can only hear things like my fingers striking the keys - I wish this was a type-writer - and the crows squawking for the last time in the day before they come back tomorrow. It's a good time because every thing feels exactly as it should. Sunday chores, a laugh with my best friend, hitting her for no reason at all, my sister going about her day like usual and talking about things like silence over lunch but sometimes I go overboard and I am told to shut up but that makes me laugh. "I love winter because it's so..." My sister and I finished that sentence with "silent" at the same time.

But I know things won't stay like this forever and I am wondering how that could be. It makes me want to collect everything that is happening around me and it makes we want to write about how my favourite part of a drive around Karachi is the highest point on the KPT bridge and I can just look down on so many neon head-lights from hundreds of car rushing forward to some place they can call their home and that makes me feel better about everything somehow. It makes me nervous that things change and it makes me nervous that time will grow with me and it will cause an uproot of all these times I have now. Everything's going to change soon.

I'm finishing high-school soon and I want to do so many things and it feels like being a part of Oxford street again because everyone's rushing past so quickly and I'm still staring at the billboards and the signs trying to direct myself. I think it's the same courage that I wanted to have when in tenth grade the class was playing a game of charades at the back of the classroom and I wanted to join them. But I didn't. I think it's the same courage I wanted to have when my friends had to leave for something and I wanted to talk to someone else. But I couldn't. But I stayed around and I promise you that I am learning. I am learning that fear is the biggest burden but courage will help me carry it if I am brave enough. Sometimes I feel so brave in my silence like I am ready to take on the world. I want to feel and I want to feel everything from heartbreak to nostalgia and I am going to, just like you. And when I feel it, I'll feel it wide and I'll feel it good and write to you about it. I look forward to that. I always will.

But for roughly four to six months, I think things will be okay. Like one last turn on the merry-go-round before we have to step off. I'm going to enjoy it, okay? I feel sad about things sometimes but I am fine. And it makes me smile when I say that. I'm doing fine. Thank God.

I was reading up on J.K. Rowling and she said, "And rock-bottom was the solid foundation that I built my life upon." I hope you keep going no matter what it is. It's important to be alive.

Love,
Me.

A Letter To You.

Dear You,

I'm writing this to you tonight because I feel like talking. It's strange but sometimes I feel like my words slowly die down as background noise in someone else's life story so here I am, writing to you so that you hear everything loud and clear. I like to be heard but I hope you believe me when I say I like to listen, too. I like to listen to everything you have to say to me and everyone else has to say to me and for a moment I start to live someone else's life, someone else's joy and someone else's day-to-day doings in between conversations. I like conversing once I get over the initial shock of it. I love to speak but sometimes I can't. I've never told this to anyone before, but one time in this oratory competition, I walked upto the podium - and I blanked out. I stood and stared at everybody while an image of a dusty road crossed my mind and an old man crossing it. And that was that. I stood and stared until my time was up and walked off. It was embarrassing.

But this other time, I was reading out a piece from "Charlie And The Chocolate Factory." I was narrating the part where Grandpa Joe miraculously bounces off his bed and onto the floor and I had so much fun doing that because I felt like Grandpa Joe's happiness. I felt like the "spark of wild excitement" dancing in his eyes and I was the spitting image of it. It felt like the story was pouring out of me right, left and center and I want to tell you that this boy in the audience was smiling, just this great big grin on his face and I looked at everybody else and they were looking back and a girl was looking back at me with smiling eyes. It was such a good day.

I was home then, I am home now. I want to tell you that my city is unorthodox and beautiful, unconventional in its beauty to me. It's not the prettiest place in the world but you cannot imagine my fascination when I look out of the car window when the Sun is blushing profusely and the sky is a dancing crimson lullaby. A girl with chocolate brown skin on a motorcycle was just as enchanted by the spectacle as me and she was looking around her and I was looking around me and there were so many people just staring out into the distance. A boy in a taxi, half smiling at a joke I did not hear. Someone on cold, dusty grounds resting upon a charpai, someone outside a utility shop with their arms folded, someone inside a rickshaw at a stand-still and someone with smoke-figurines erupting at the end of their cigarette. My city looked so contemplative and it was beautiful to me.

Sometimes I feel like people are fresh off The Potter's Wheel, the clay of their skin fresh from the wheel-head and God, the eternal craft-maker. The little embellishments on their face like a pea-shaped nose and a half-smile, that's what makes them special to me. Inside the Physics laboratory, my class was spread out across the room and they were all fresh off The Potter's Wheel. I remember thinking how everyone was a masterpiece and if that sounds exaggerated then I just want to tell you that there never could be another You or another I and I hope we can make the best of that.

Don't be a stranger. Talk soon.

Thanks for listening. I am infinitely grateful. I am infinitely blessed.

Love,
Me. 

A Letter To God.

Dear God,

I want to talk to someone so I will talk to you. Karachi is finally cold and it even rained a few days ago. I am wearing my favourite sweater and things are quiet. I am closeted behind silence, behind cold skin and ordinarily black eyes. Or maybe they are the darkest shade of brown. I don't know. Sometimes in class I feel nomadic and faraway but that doesn't mean people around me aren't beautiful. Because they are. They're beautiful when they talk animatedly and they're beautiful when they laugh and it makes me smile because I am painted there somewhere in between all of them but I feel alright. And I am thankful.

I keep thinking about how the world keeps breaking. I can almost hear the Snap! as a crack widens just a little bit more. Believe me, I am aware of the suffering around me but I also know that people and me, we find things that make it okay. Like how it is when we're all waiting for the other teacher to enter the classroom after the one teaching the last class leaves and that is the moment somebody stretches, somebody else makes a stupid comment at the back of the classroom, some people start talking loudly and I can hear them. At that moment, everybody is brave because they leave behind stories and they leave behind pain and they leave behind so many things to just let themselves be and it reminds of this song that says, "Sometimes nothing, it keeps me together at the seams."

Thanks for everything. I want to keep saying that even when things around me end and begin, even if sometimes at night the future scares me and I want to be okay and even when there's nothing that I can do. I don't understand a lot of things but I wanted to tell you that I want to. I keep hearing and reading how hate is too great a burden to carry and I think that is true. Maybe because we understand the people we hate when we become the people we hate. I think people make bad choices all the time but we've done that too, haven't we? I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that nothing should be left unfixed. That apologies are hard but all it takes is twenty seconds of insane courage, twenty seconds of embarrassing bravery. Last night I was thinking about Aurooj, who studied with us in college until she passed away last year. I wished I had stood up for her but I hadn't. So a few days ago, somebody was crying and I was hesitant to approach them but then I thought I couldn't take more guilt and that people can be saved, people can be fixed while they're still alive, while they are still fixable. So I told them it was okay and they smiled. And the day went on and I'm sure she got through and another day welcomed her in that she lived to see. I'm trying to learn. Most things just take courage.

I also think quiet people are braver than they look. There's so much going on but I always turn to you. Because you're the only one who can truly help me. I see things on the news, about my country and about the world and I wonder if it is realistic to pray for everyone but I do wish that when you get time to read this letter, I hope you add a little bit of patience in all of us so we can keep getting through one day at a time.

Thanks for listening. To this and to all the things I could never say. I don't mind being a wallflower. I get the best view of the universe.

Love always,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

It's really silent now and I keep saying that in all of my letters because I love breathing it in. I guess silence runs in my blood and it's good to see the chaos quietening down, almost asleep but gently breathing because I can hear everything clearly and I can hear myself and I just find it fascinating. I've been up since the crack of dawn, but I don't mind. I love the cold and I love my city and I guess on some days, it's just good to be alive.

This may sound silly, but I wanted to tell you that I wanted the world to be beautiful again. Not the everything-is-happy, nothing-is-wrong kind. Just in the way it is. Broken and empty sometimes, but alive all the same. And gradually I'm able to see that. I'm able to see that in long-sleeved sweaters and beautiful smiles and just watching two friends having a laughter fit at nothing at all. And I joined them. I laughed and they laughed. But the universe keeps contracting in my stomach and spins round in circles sometimes when I think about what is to come. Sometimes it's just as simple as my eleventh grade result that seems to be on everyone's mind. While my stomach lurched at the very though, I looked around and I guess I smiled a little to myself because I was reminded how it felt like to still be alive, to still have something to worry about, to still have a weight at the back of my mind and the future laid out before me like the stars lining up on the night sky -  it's dark but it still holds the greatest things in the universe.

I suppose I'm getting a bit carried away here. It's just that I was thinking this morning how I could not quite understand how people believed how precious life was. I didn't understand why people thought it was meant to be lived and not merely exist - if that makes sense. And then I thought about how the biggest irony of life was that the most tragic thing that could happen to it was death. And the death of things was always sad - whether it was love, life, hope or friendship or even memory. And I guess I don't need to explain to you how that feels because you know what it's like. To not want to get up and to not move on and stare at the traces instead and believe it is still there. Maybe you know that feeling. And I think that's when you realize how important it is to know about how important it is to be alive. You matter to a thing, a person and a part of the universe that could never exist without you. Without you, it's always going to be incomplete. I guess why I believe we're miracles is that we never know just how many lives we've found our places in - we never know how far kindness goes. A good thought could travel down a generation and a good letter could be found by the most random of people and leave its mark on their memories.What I'm trying to say is: if you're alive, then to the universe, you are just as important as anybody else. The story would never be complete without you.

If you're wondering how I'm doing, I'm still the by-stander. I still watch everything from sidelines but the best part about that? I've started to like it. All the things that will go on without me, will do exactly that no matter how much I want to change it. So last night, I was in a grey chair while everybody played cards and I laughed a lot. Accepting myself is the greatest thing I've ever done.

I've been reading this book and it says that when you stop looking for something, it shows up. But it turns up, it does. And it always takes you by surprise.

For laughter, for oreos, for pretty book covers and friendship, I am infinitely grateful. I am infinitely blessed.

Love,
Me.