Dearest friend,
Yesterday evening, I thought about writing to you. Granted, we don’t know each other well yet, and I don’t know if we ever will — but if you are reading this, you are my friend and I am yours, for whatever purposes this arrangement ends up serving. Do you mind if I use that word? Arrangement? It is very clinical, isn’t it? Like a business deal? This isn’t business. It’s not transactional, what I am trying to do. If anything, you are getting the scarcer end of the proverbial stick here, having to be a passive listener to my attempt at writing something that isn’t protected by the armor that fiction cloaks my words under. Would “relationship” be a better word choice? That feels rather intimate for a first letter, no? But I suppose it will do. It is a relationship, this writer to reader dynamic. I was talking to someone earlier today about how it is often so easy to either hate or love ourselves to extreme degrees because the internal core of the self is ultimately amorphous; it exists, but it is perfect to project onto or define as we so freely choose because it is a nebulous thing, liable to stretch and contract and evolve without ever really solidifying, try as we might to rely on things like astrological placements and personality typology to pinpoint things we believe are intrinsic to our internal existence. Instead, it is our interactions with the external world and the reactions we learn to cultivate from these interactions — our likes, dislikes, loves, hates, fears, desires — that have shape, have definition. Regardless of which metaphysical school of thought you subscribe to in response to the age-old question of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in a forest and no one hears it, a good portion of our lives are the things we perceive and the ways people perceive us. Our external existence is what makes our internal one if not real then realer. And by that logic, you — nameless, faceless, formless reader-friend — are what makes my words realer. They could be real when I put them on the page, but it is when they reach you that they take on new life by being part of someone else’s. Someone else’s mind, someone else’s thoughts, someone else’s existence. My words have shape now because you have perceived them. This letter is the telephone wire between my mind and yours, and so perhaps when I use the word “relationship” what I mean is connection.
Are you still reading? It’s okay if you want to stop. I won’t mind. I won’t even know unless you tell me. If you feel guilty about wanting to stop, I understand. I feel the same way about newsletters I don’t finish. So here is your permission to stop. It is a bit strange for me to use the word connection. It’s almost violatory, and definitely a flawed and even eerie presumption, to assume that a connection has been made simply through perception.
If you’re still here reading, though, I am happy to have you. It’s been a while since I’ve written a proper letter, even longer since I’ve made a new friend, and I’m afraid I’m out of practice. These things usually begin with an introduction, right? Hello. I’m Sha. That is not my real first name, but it is close enough to it. It’s a nickname used only by people who have known me from birth, and I think it says a few eyebrow-raising things about me that it is the one I have chosen to use online. At my real birthplace, I was born around the peak of summer heat, when the wave pools are busiest and the watermelons are sweetest. Where I now live, my birthday falls on the early days of spring, coming and going at the same time as the cherry blossoms. I was raised by my grandparents, and from the age of thirteen onwards, by no one at all. The first distinction I was ever awarded was Little Miss Polite, when I was in first grade, and the most recent one was the summa cum laude they engraved on the university diploma that they had to mail me because I graduated in the middle of a pandemic and slept through the virtual ceremony. I am very good at opening tight lids and very bad at remembering the lyrics to English songs I’ve had on repeat for years. I get very happy about slow, empty mornings and very sad about slow, empty late nights. I get very excited about spontaneous plans and very stressed about how there doesn’t seem to be an end to debt and loan interest and bills and the jobs that never feel enough for them. I love people, but I think maybe I love more what I believe they could be, to themselves and to each other. And, on the flipside of that logic, I do not love myself all that much, because I am too set on trying to love the better version of it that I need to believe it has the capacity to be. That sounds sadder than I promise it is, and not loving myself is not the same as hating it; I think often, as pretentious and skewed a thought process as this must seem to you, that it is because I love the world so much and the good people that populate it that I cannot bear to exist in it in anything less than the most optimized version of myself possible. “I feel this enormous debt to the world for letting me exist and do all the damage my living requires,” to quote one of my favorite poems, and the only way I can repay that debt is to work at living in such a way that causes no further damage to other people, the opposite of which I believe is a given if I love myself too much that I fail to view myself as critically as I should.
I promise I mention all these not to coerce your trust in my ability to be truly vulnerable, which I’m sure you’ll soon find to be quite questionable, nor to trick you into feeling sympathy or empathy or camaraderie with me. Really, I just think that if I were to treat this introductory letter as a first date of sorts, it will probably save you a lot of time if I were to lay some carefully selected cards out on the table — not in a trauma-dump kind of way, or at least I hope not, but more along the lines of, Are you sure you want to be here? Are the vibes working for you so far? Are you feeling some tendrils of incompatibility already? Did you just realize you are reading someone’s personal newsletter and came to a moment of clarity about whether someone’s somber reflections on an otherwise relatively privileged life is something you want to take time out of your day to read? If you need it, here is a second permission to stop reading. Here is a third. A fourth. A fifth.
I might even want you to stop reading. I want you to stop reading because what I really want is permission to stop writing. I do this, too, in retrospect, when I am writing a story; I find reasons not to continue it, reasons why I won’t do it justice, reasons why no one will read it. Reasons, then, why I don’t have to make it into something with any hope of being real. Whether in the way of Pinocchio or the way of Pygmalion, whether it is the creation or the creator that yearns for more — stories, once you imbue them with enough life to take their first steps, have a habit of wanting to be something even more than that, and there comes a point where it grows impossible to deny them this. I love that most about writing, that feeling of a statue carving itself out of the marble under your own hands, but I do not know if it’s something I know how to let spin out of control when it is no longer fiction, when it is my life and my thoughts and my feelings that will find their way far outside of where I have stubbornly kept them close.
Sha, you might say, that’s an intimacy problem, which I will cheerfully counter by saying that I never said it wasn’t. But it’s a surface-level diagnosis, that one, because the heart of this first letter, the point I keep coming back to from different angles, is that I want so badly to be perfect for you, faceless new friend. I want so badly to be perfect from this beginning we have here — and by perfect I don’t mean flawless, either. Flawlessness is no longer perfection in our generation, at least not in the way that the perfection we now demand from our perfect people is that they should have flaws and lows and vulnerabilities, so long as they are able to overcome them. That is the perfection we want. We want the illusion of accessibility and relatability. We point to an overnight rags-to-riches story as if it isn’t a one in a million success and squint at nepotism babies for the glossy advantages handed to them. We demand sadness and bitterness and introspection from our contemporary female musicians and remain unstirred by their attempts at otherwise, as if depth is only achieved through leaning into suffering. We consume documentaries of our pop star idols, the behind the scenes fights and the blinked back tears and the disappointments and the stories about everything that preceded their big break into the industry, and we praise them for humanity that we shouldn’t need proof of. We use the adjective raw — a word that came down to us from the Old English hreaw, which means soft, bleeding, uncooked flesh — as if it’s the highest form of praise when evaluating how much a piece of work has touched us, even though that is still what it is: a piece of work, controlled to precise degrees by whoever wrote, edited, directed it. And I think, ultimately, that’s what I’m afraid of. I want to be perfect for you means I want to be human for you, but I am afraid that in writing this, in choosing what comes after each word and leaving you to make what you will out of these sentences, you won’t find the perfection you want so much as you would the young, tender flesh that makes up my heart, the size of one of my two tiny fists held up to my left ribcage, no bigger than a teacup coaster. Because sometimes when I use the word raw for myself, what I mean is that I am inexperienced, my knowledge of the world so incomplete, my ability to make my self real in my own words still untested and perpetually clumsy.
I hope you’ll forgive that. I hope you’ll forgive how, as I said in the beginning of this letter, I thought about writing to you yesterday evening. Thought about writing to you because, for all that I am afraid and unsure how to proceed, I am also a deeply alone person. By which I don’t mean I am lonely, only that lately it’s been difficult to complete a single thought, much less string a few together into something articulable, and I feel a literal alone-ness inside my mind. Sometimes I feel that I am not even in there myself, like I am a body with a head and a skull and a brain, all corporeal variables that point to this mind belonging to me, but when the thoughts fire, they remain disembodied and I feel them move past me and around me and through me and every other preposition except in me, where they should be, where they are. And so I conjured you up, my friend, a body inside my mind, and before I knew it, the words had form and the thoughts have become real.
Now — here you are, there you are, reading them. And if you have gotten here, to the end of this letter, I have a confession for you: my heart breaks with gratitude knowing you have read what I wrote, because more than I have ever wanted permission to stop writing, all I crave, when I let myself admit how much more I want to take from this world, is permission to keep writing. Permission to never, ever stop writing. Permission not just to make something real, but to be real. I want permission to live, permission to love, and when I write something that feels true and it reaches another person, that is one step closer to being absolved of everything that makes it so, so difficult to ask to be allowed connection with the world I feel so much for.
So if you stuck around even after I gave you permission to go, thank you. If you felt bad about leaving and wanted to at least finish this letter before going, thank you, and again, let nothing bind you to me. And if you choose to continue sticking around for more letters: with all my heart, thank you. I believe you and I will be good — friends? One-sided pen pals? Business partners? What did we settle on again? I don’t think we settled on anything. That’s alright, too. I have hope we will figure something out.
Your huckleberry friend,
Sha
Dear new business partner, friend, connection, person in which I am engaging a one-way relationship with,
I enjoyed reading and will continue to read. Regarding perfection, I think the closest thing to perfection would be happiness. It’s probably easier to prioritize your and someone else’s happiness and keep perfection in the background. Cause like, being happy feels cool I guess 🧐
(a preface, then a request:
i do tend to think in visuals a lot, and this reads like exposition but in an excavatory sense - like a confessional but without the religion or the shame; in its stead a bare, earnest honesty. going off of that - this does feel a little like you're unearthing little bits out from yourself and admitting them over and across this half-dark membrane - screen - of halfway-anonymity, into whichever hands choose or choose not to take it.
i wouldn't want for my response to be an intrusion beyond that screen - even if this is a connection, to realise it into a conversation would be taking something away from it - that burden to respond that you mentioned before. so, presumptuous as this may be - treat this response as one from not me as your friend, but me as a halfway-anonymous presence on the internet? a point receiving the signal you've sent out. - 🧚)
i wouldn't want this to be anything above an acknowledgement, actually, or have it be more than - you know, ping! message received. your radio-waves've hit a channel, someone's tuning in. but of the scattered bits of thoughts i do want to share: pretentious implies pretense and i protest strongly at you feeling the need to apologise for thoughts as gracefully self-aware and substantial as yours. i'm aware this may just be another facet of the permission you ask for in order to justify your expression, and i know you don't need that permission to be granted (who would i be to do that anyways, that's silly). i'm protesting for the sake of it. that is to say - my acknowledgement of your thoughts and words as thoroughly deserving in all possible ways definitely isn't needed, per se, but i do want to do it anyways, as a reminder or as proof that someone does take them for what they are, what you mean them as.
apart from that - i don't think i can properly lay out what this left me feeling. you did make me smile, did make me laugh, did make me clutch my heart like that stereotype. if i sound convoluted it's because i resort to longer words the bigger my thoughts get about something. i still love the way you write, really really no less when it's not fiction you're sharing. one last thing - i was nearing the end and thinking to myself about how you really do inspire reciprocity in the best ways; if a goal of yours is to touch hearts in that sort of keen, oh-okay-wow way then you've hit it. god, i love your writing. take care.