Letters to the dead

This was part of an email I sent to my late friend on the day she died. I didn't know she was so seriously ill. She never read it and now she is not here anymore. Or maybe she is everywhere and everything, her atoms travelling the entire universe. So it's time to share that email with the world. We never talked again, but at least now I know what I have to do. I have to make sure I don't give up, like she never did, although large parts of her life were living hell.

"...I can’t for the life of me understand what I am supposed to be doing here on this planet. I am 36 and still don’t have any idea what my role should be, how to respond to any role, what it is that the world needs me for, why I am here in the first place. I do know that if I go, this world will be poorer, and I am not saying this due to any inflated sense of self-importance. From that aspect, my creations are far more important than I am. I brought them here from the dreamland, from the collective unconscious, and I filtered them through my experiences and my unique point of view. No-one else will manage to bring the same things here and express them like I do because no-one else is me. I don’t know if I am a good writer or not, but I love my ‘children’ like any parent should love theirs. Such a pity our parents were such complete failures. Maybe if I had a different childhood I wouldn’t be looking for meaning, because meaning would have been self-explanatory. A psychologist once said to my friend A. that only children from dysfunctional families look for meaning and a sense of belonging, because they never had this offered to them. A happy child feels they belong here, they have no doubts or fears or questions of that kind. I am not unhappy with my share, I do count my blessings, and I can’t change the past. It doesn’t really matter now, and I would miss the weird, quirky individual I’ve grown to be due to my fucked up childhood. But the feeling of not belonging drives me batty and gets me so very depressed. I guess we all have our demons and the better we get to know them, the better company they keep us during those long sleepless nights.

When I feel very depressed, I always dig up my older writing and read it again. Older heroes, some of them created when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, most of the story plots not valid anymore, because as I grew up I added elements and made it more and more complex and less teenage fiction… Still they are mine, they are my first creations, written in Greek on paper that by now has yellowed and creased and has been read hundreds of times. Inevitably, trying to acquire a sense of belonging, I fall back to my creations, I go back to familiar space, just like you would resort to your music. They are my safe space, the place I built in this world for me because this world didn’t have one reserved for me, or wasn’t willing to host my being. I belong there, to my stories, not here, and maybe that’s the problem. Children who grew up feeling unloved and unwanted open their hearts and look for alternative worlds in which they are important, cherished and protected. They grow up to be gifted individuals because to escape the outside, from a very early age they turn inside. Most of them, through the inside, they discover and open the door to the Other, they pierce the Veil and go to the Other side. These children are always with one foot here and one foot there, changelings that one side doesn’t want them and the other side can’t have them. They also bring gifts here, gifts from the Other side in the form of art and innate understanding. Outsiders, lost children, weirdoes, outcasts and social failures, forever struggling to fit in and make sense of this world. I am so tired of this world, tired of my legacy, tired trying to fit in. I read my old stories like a child would run to the cupboard and embrace the dress of its dead mother, trying to get a whiff of her scent, trying to feel her close, trying to feel loved and safe. That scent is getting less and less each year, until the child isn’t sure if they can indeed smell something or it’s a ghost, a comforting memory cause they have nothing else to hold on to. I feel like that child. I have no mother or father, no siblings, no-one. We’re all isolated in our bodies and our minds and we live separate existences, and then our paths cross with people we come to care about and then we’re alone again. We’re always and forever alone and that loneliness sometimes kills me. It’s like the cat you love so much and caress and keep close and sometimes that same animal turns and claws at your face for no reason. 

Don’t worry about me, I’ll keep going and keep trying. I miss you, I miss you so much though we haven’t met. I need you to be here. Please be here. Don’t go away and leave me, it would just make life even more unbearable. I care about you so much and I don’t even know how that happened. I really don’t, you sly, subtle Finnigami.

We’ll talk again soon, I’ll write you a normal letter.

I am sending you a chapter of my story. As I’ve said before, I don’t write something for someone, but I do write things because of someone or something. Can you guess who that piece refers to?"