heart consumption

Dear K-

You’re an interesting case. It seems you want to be close and you want to be intimate-you need those relationships in your life that make you feel worthwhile. But at the same instant there also exists a dismissive trait, one that pushes away and fears that close attachment can only bring disappointment and regret.

Sometimes I read your letters and wonder if you’re still writing as me, or if you’re writing as you. Do you understand what I mean? Sometimes I feel so similar. As if we’re both portraying this painful and delicate theatre performance, and right now you’re in the middle of Act Two, at your character’s lowest point. I’m in the background for now, merely moving about the scenery. And for now I am content there; I’ve been distancing myself from family and friends again, as I periodically do. But your character, desperately fishing about for his heart among the sewer muck, is at an all-time low. He’s moaning and dreaming of something better, but the dream is blank and white like a bank of new fallen snow.

What of Act Three? Where is the redemption? Will it come? How long is this miserable second act going to draw out before we finally break for intermission?

I’m sending you scraps of my life, in the hopes that it will make you smile. I want you to pick up the broken pieces of my days and fill your nights, finally finding sleep among the bits of me you find in them. I’m not sure what else to do. I wish I could send you pages upon pages of letters and drawings, but I feel like that would be a less accurate portrayal of what my life is truly like right now. It’s not flowing or flourishing. It’s flaking off, like rust from oxidized metal, and I’m sweeping up those little bits and sending them to you. Hopefully it doesn’t make you angry. You can just toss them away if you’d rather.

Warmer weather brings lighter hearts,
-K