I had found a letter once, laying on the ground in the street. Me, being the read everything person that I am, picked it up and read it. I couldn’t tell who it was written to or who was the writer so to me it was from and to a total stranger. I didn’t feel I was invading the privacy of someone I knew but rather reading a short story found in the universe.
Yeah, I read it.
I took it up to my loft. I made a fresh coffee and I sat down on the floor in the afternoon sunshine streaming in my eleven windows.
It was an I’m Sorry letter after a young lovers (obviously very young from the reading) quarrel. Maybe even a forever break up. I would never know and, not knowing where to send the letter and not knowing if the letter had ever made its destination, had ever been read by the person it was written for.
Had that person read it and then thrown it into the gutter it lay in? Had they thrown it out in the trash and the street was where it landed? Did the letter reach their heart with the outpouring of the writers?
Did they care? And should they? Me, not knowing the whole story?
I sat there sipping my coffee, sitting cross legged, after reading that letter and thinking about all the letters I had written to a guy my heart was breaking over.
When I was young.
Gosh, I haven’t done that in a very long time. And I kinda wonder now…why not? I mean not just break up letters, though those as well, but, love letters.
And should I? Well, I mean, I doubt they ever did much or would do much for those I wrote them to. I doubt most had ever really even been read. But perhaps they benefited me in some way. And I wonder if not writing those kinds of letters anymore somehow doesn’t? As if somehow me not allowing myself the writing of letters, sent or not, the outpouring of my heart, my soul, my love, my passion, and my hurt, harms me now, when I am older and wiser and less apt to throw myself into someones arms, less apt to be completely unpractical, less apt to cry for or over anyone.
I think it’s a little sad to have lost that bit of me. That bit of youth. When did it stop? What stopped it? I try and think of this, pinpoint the moment my heart seemed too cold, or perhaps too weary to do so any more.
I laugh now at the memory of some of the letters I’ve written. I don’t remember all the words but always the feeling that went into them. And for whom. I laugh at that, now, too. But at the same time I don’t laugh AT it at all. I yearn for being able to ugly cry over a love spat. I yearn for feeling just THAT deeply and desperately.
When do we grow up? When is that point that we become so…LIVED…that we stop feeling like that? I will never call a young person stupid for their over dramatic feelings and for their show of them outwardly. God…be young…feel so deeply it hurts. Because that is some of what you will remember the most at the end of life. Even if it was bad, it is good to remember, to have had.
A Kind Of Single Lady 