Dear friend,
I want to write the hallmark letter of having figured everything about myself; of saying that there are many things you learn at twenty, of having extricated myself completely from stupidity and delusion to embark on wise retrospect – when, to be honest, I can’t even figure out the latter part of this sentence. You think you have a grand metaphor of love! And then. You think you know! And then. You think your actions constitute beauty! And then. You think you know the difference between intending for yourself and intending for the world! And then. I do not really arrive at definite knowledge, but much more to think about, because things get re-named, re-arranged, somebody’s laughter splices through one of your strangest ghost-thoughts and comes apart. The ghost may be a costume.
The thick of life, we can call it. But, and, however, also, I feel the collapse of boundaries in accumulated wisdom. Sometimes I know I can trace the boundaries of my limbs and find comfort in things I am yet to learn. The universe is also home to my mistakes, all of them, days charging over me sequentially like I have a duty yet to the life I have to live. This knowledge of body is new-found though; some days it is crushed, some days it is growing.
And the life that we have to live. I am trying to align myself to an honesty, an honesty towards what I feel and what I know as opposed what I would like to feel and what I would like to know, so that I can navigate around you, about you substantially, and not like a dream of my own self.
Seismic shifts; adequacy, achievement, glory are still our dreams. Some days when the coherence of things does not hold, I want to write to you about the things we grew up with; so we grew up with wind filling up our clothes, so we grew up with staying to the side of the street, so we grew up with eyes concentrating on details of pebbles and stones that will not matter, so we grew up with millions of undocumented moments of breathing. Maybe this cannot be constructed into beauty, or consequence, but they also register as crucial moments of life as we have known it. The durability of the in-betweens.
So if I say to you that we born in both decay and in vitality, and in combinations of both, then that is my offering to you of comfort. An assurance that things and people and we have not been beautiful in constancy, and an assurance that continuity is not broken by decay. Things continue to grow, and so do we.
May you bloom.
Love,
Me.
