Letter: #6

Guess who I spoke to today? Cover this up. Guess. 

Emily. I pressed her into this kind of lame, limp hug because I knew full well it wasn't her I was trying to lock in, tie down, stay -- but I hugged her because she leant against the wall, in all her redheaded glory (which she has actually grown in to, by the way), and she listened to me tell her, rather euphemistically, how upset I was about the change. I say euphemistically, because all I said was that I got "sad" about how everything was different. I also said the reason I was "sad" was because we'd all be split up -- me, Emily, and that table we sat on. You know the one. You spent enough time ogling it when we wouldn't speak to you. Firm-lipped, that's what we were.

See, I have had very little change in my life. For all my years, which are so very few, I have lived fluidly, with little disruption, so I'm sure, or I hope, that you understand why I would be upset when anything of the most minor static breaks in my perpetual radio show life - I hope you can. It's a young thing, it's an innocent thing, but it feels real to me. That doesn't make it valid, of course, but the validity matters very little when your inside stomach is growling because feeling becomes physical, and it breaks breaks breaks through flesh, through skin, through means. It throws off digestion, peristalsis occurs backwards -- it doesn't go down, anymore. It comes back up, flails, hangs -- in awkward persistence. It keeps going. It contracts. It dilates. It rips. And it keeps going. Like this.

I'm conscious that what I feel now is a minute shadow in the blackness of the storm which casts overhead the current sunshine. I'm aware that this year is going to be hard, and that, more than anything, is why I'm struggling now. Forget the future, forget the chance that I may fail each examination I am taking -- you will be lost to me in days. Weeks if I am lucky. I will never see you again. All those weekends I roamed through main streets and back streets trying to see if you would wander idly past will be nothing in the face of what I comprehend will happen. Please, please, give me something to live on. When you are gone, give me your words of praise, give me the smallest granule of yourself, just something to sustain me. Or don't. If you knew what was kinder, maybe you'd let me flail, imagine you hating me. Don't hate me. 

So I spoke to Emily today. I gave her a hug because it was the closest I could get to you. I spoke about you without ever actually addressing you -- but I spoke about my sadness, so same thing. You and my suffering are merged, one and holy, now. She didn't seem to relate. Nobody ever does.

Yours,

Abbey