The Letter I Never Gave You

I don’t know how to start this. I don’t think there is a manual for things like this. I guess you could argue there really are no manuals in life at all. We just figure out the direction as we go. So here I am, doing the same. I am unsure of the contents, but I know I must do this. I know I must write this.

This is the letter I never gave you.

What I am about to share is meant to the confinement of a journal, but I lost it. I left it on a bus a few months ago, the one where I wrote about you. It was small and black and marked by stories and words. I wish I had it because my remaining journals are devoted to their own subjects. I categorize my journals like this because my thoughts are too vast. I categorize because it helps me clarify ambiguities and I’m just trying to make sense, make sense of my feelings.

Are you fine? I am not sure if I am. I feel everything but fine. I feel scared at first, scared of the depth of emotions I’m encountering. I feel incredibly weighted by my own disappointment. I feel angry with you for what you didn’t do. I feel upset with myself for letting you affect me. I feel uncertain and at a lost of where to go from here. I feel so weak.

Feelings are opposite of how I was raised. I was raised to be stoic. I was taught emotions were feeble and that apathy was strength. I was taught to blink away my tears. I was told to be stronger and to never let anyone see myself anything less than resilient. I carried a stern face and was conditioned to conceal emotion and I believed wholeheartedly in the mantra my entire life not realizing until now the repercussions.

I hardened. So much that I never really opened up to you. I think you met me amidst a transition. I am not sure who I was when our paths first crossed. I think she was someone pleasant, someone seemingly happy. The type of girl whose eyes did some glimmering shit and tilted her head back whenever she laughed. I think she was someone who could have made you smile, had you given her the chance to.

Everything is shifting, I can’t decipher what is right and what is wrong as clearly and my eyes are watering. I reach for stability but instead fall and blink, blink, blink. Feelings are reaching height but I must suppress. I will not cry. Don’t let them ever see you like this. I try, but I can’t blink enough. Why am I here when I don’t want to be? Why don’t we do what we simply desire? Why do we do what others expect, why do we give in to others’ happiness and not our own? Why am I here, and not there where you asked me to be? Why am I asking myself so many redundant questions? Such is the chaotic nature of my current scene.

What’s the point of all this? What’s the connection back to you? That’s a good question, one I don’t have a clear answer for. There’s some relevant relationship between all these topics but I can’t exactly pinpoint it, maybe because I’m confused. Confused as to what I’m supposed to feel and what I actually do.

This is unchartered territory I don’t do here. But I’m going to break my own rules and dive right in because I need to configure and learn. I need to break years of emotionless conditioning. I need to learn to feel because that’s what normal emotionally stable people are like, and I need to learn their ways for my own sanity.

Here’s another vice of mine you should know. I am too selfless. Is that even a possibility, to be too caring? To be too concerned with the welfare of others? To be too invested in pleasing others? Because that was the justification for my leaving. I don’t fully understand yours but that’s why I fled. Not for me, but for others. I am not selfish enough to pursue what I want but rather, I want to appease all and not just one. For who and for what are not as significant as the act itself. I left, you left and there’s nothing else to it.

I’m trying to provide context. Not just for you but for me. I’m trying to analyze sentiments; I’m trying to understand emotion. And the only thing I’ve come to learn is that it’s just painful and messy. There’s nothing glorious about it, it’s just another facet of being human.

Human enough to admit there were wrongs done. Both ways. Human enough to accept sentiments. Human enough to not subconsciously resume the off switch in every moment of vulnerability.

So here I am, switching the emotions on. May my tears flow and may the honesty of it all drown and suffocate the both of us. We didn’t lose something I guess, we lost the potential of it. We could have been, would have been something great, something epic I’m sure, but we were too coward enough to admit it or act on it. Instead, we sabotaged it unwillingly or I would like to think. I don’t want to believe it was intentional; I need that bit of false hope. We were too absent to even try. We were too young to know better. Machiavelli was right; we are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear. And I guess we were victims of the latter. We were too fearful of our emotions and the sheer power of what they promised.