i took the lights and radio towers out of my dreams

Dear K-

I am sorry to hear about your friend. It’s always hard to lose someone, especially unexpectedly, and especially when it was anticipated on their end but they didn’t relay that message until it was already over. Suicide always makes me feel guilty and selfish. I think to myself “what could I have done” or “why didn’t they tell me” and even sometimes “was I not enough to keep them wanting to live”? I may have only talked to the person once, at some crowded college party and we exchanged some joke about Jamaica, but still their choice to later consciously leave this world always hangs heavy and I feel like an opportunity was missed. I am not foolish enough to think these sentiments are original or unique; I am sure death tends to rock all our cradles in a similar fashion whenever it passes near. We always miss the things most that we can never have back.

In regards to your previous rants of the new year, I did not mean to make you feel targeted by my lamentations, although I always welcome your perspective. It is one thing to read a past love’s work and admire it for its sentimentality and heart, but it’s another thing to react in such a way as to make the author feel cornered, trapped. You know that I have a long history of writing without an intent to share, so I still startle easily when I realize that I am exposed, vulnerable. I don’t like my words being twisted to suit another’s purpose, especially someone who has left such a bitter taste in my mouth. But I guess that is inevitably the plight of every writer; once you give yourself up and let other’s in on your world, it’s no longer yours. Someone will always find themselves in your writing, whether the interpretation is accurate or not. Someone will always feel when they read your work (or maybe they won’t, maybe it won’t resonate at all), and that is something you and I and everyone else just has to accept. I am sure some of my favorite authors would probably be disappointed in the sentiments they evoke in me, because perhaps it wasn’t their intent. But there’s nothing to be done of it. You are right. I shouldn’t let it stop me. What should I care what some little, lonely man thinks?

I have been drinking a lot more coffee lately. I know it isn’t good for me, but I have been trying to be better about other aspects of my life in exchange for this simple pleasure. It’s hard to give it up. There just isn’t anything that can compare to staring out a cloudy winter window while sitting in my knickers, sipping a steaming cup of black coffee in the gentle morning silence and musing at the birds around my backyard feeder. I like to watch them flit and flutter and their undulating flight paths. I don't get to do it as often as I'd like.

Yours cordially,
-k