The Words I Wrote, The Letters I Never Sent

I have never been accused of anti-loquaciousness (reticence per say).  Ever.  If anything readers of this blog and other written outlets of mine have only skimmed the surface of my proliferation.  The depth of my talent is a dark one, and still untested.  I can confirm one mark, though- I have always claimed that I am better on paper than in person, and there is a probable reason for that:

I write when I am happy.

I write when I am sad.

I write when I am excited, nervous, elated, fractured, fragile, overwhelmed, underwhelmed, delighted, decimated; when I am perfect and when I am anything but.

I write to people, I respond to people in writing.

I write when I am, in any way, distressed.  And when I am distressed, and the floodgates open, I write my most devastating and interesting things.  I write myself.

And then I hide myself.

Because in my most challenging moments, eras, landscapes, I have written letters.  Dozens and dozens of letters; letters that I have never sent.  Some remain tucked away in the back of my desk, or buried beneath socks in a drawer, or in a shoebox littered with memories and memos.  Some have long since been discarded.  I write letters because I have to write something.  And because on paper the words and world make sense to me.

I make sense to me- on paper.

In grad school, I addressed all of my letters to my college roommate and best friend Suzannah.  To be fair, many many letters were addressed to Suz that did actually get to her.  After college she joined the Peace Corps while I took a year off before throwing myself headlong into the pursuit of a Master's Degree.  She, having been placed in Niger, had limited access to internet.  So old school letter-writing it was.  And it was glorious in the most old-fashioned of ways.  The constant and graceful written exchange grew familiar, intuitive, and confessional.

So it seemed reasonable and natural to draft all of my letters of distressed doubt to Suzannah.  All of the frustration, all of the mistrust, all of the pain of putting myself through Grad school erupted- the ink flowed like lava onto far too many yellow legal-pad pages.  So much of me wound up on those pages, scribbled and scrawled and scratched out; figured out.  Some pages are stained with tiny water marks- circles where my tears hit.  Other pages are so quickly and frenetically written that they are barely legible, even to me.

Those letters I still have.

Then there are the letters to my ex.  Well, emails to be precise- but sort of the same difference.  In the distressed doubt of my first long relationship, my first truly serious one, I began to write emails.  It started with one, a long one, detailing everything I felt but felt I could not really say to him.  The next day, another followed in its wake- one stacked on top of the other in the 'Drafts' tab of my inbox.  Soon enough I found myself daily writing emails I would never ever send him.  Soon enough I did not differentiate them; instead I separated them only by lines in an ever-lengthening single email document. Each entry had a date.  Each entry had a confession.

Each entry had a sliver of my heart tied to it, laced through all the loops of letters.

Sometime after the relationship ended, after I had moved into the phase of simultaneously hurting and healing myself (much of which I wrote about and continue to write about [also it was more hurting than healing, but that much so far should be obvious]), I opened that draft- that years long draft.  On a whim, I copied it and pasted it into a word document.  It spanned sixty-seven pages.  Single spaced.

Sixty-seven pages of my heart and mind and spirit.  Sixty-seven pages of brutal, broken, brilliant honesty.  Ultimately… sixty-seven pages of love, or maybe love destroying itself.

It wasn't long after that I deleted it- both the word document and the email draft.  I don't know if it was an attempt to forgive myself or forget myself.

But here's the things… letters get hidden or destroyed, selves are forgiven or forgotten, but words stay forever.

Words last forever.

And until there are words I have to hide again.  Until then, Dearhearts.