Letter to a friend

 

Dear Friend, 

The world, you, me, this letter and the ever-flowing continuum of time. I write this to you, knowing, and that too very clearly, that these letters containing mixed and incoherent feelings of a late teenager, as always, will never reach you.

It’s winter here, and today, probably the coldest day of this season. And I do not write this letter from my home sitting on my comfortable bed, inside the blanket drinking a hot cup of tea. As I write to you now, I am in a cold and prickly metal chair, it’s chillness entering my hipbone, my feet half numb with frost, one hand holding a diary and a blue pen on the other running both ends of a blank paper, sitting very uncomfortably and thinking about you, suffering from… God knows what.

And strangely, I don’t want to move, not if my backbone splits, or my foot gets frostbite. Don’t judge me dear, and I know you will not, but I have asked myself countless times why I am writing like this to you. Honestly, I don’t have an answer. Am I trying to be brave? Am I insecure? Am I showing off my pain? Am I trying to make you suffer? I know nothing.  And I know it’s stupid, but I don’t want you to feel sorry for me as you read this. It’s just that I want to reach you and you are unreachable.  I think its the way we exist. It almost feels like you are somewhere on the other side of the world, and to reach you, I have to penetrate this big and thick wall of some abstract material hanging around in the air, of so little value to the world but so important to me and you.

I am strange. Aren’t I? I never write, and even when I do, all I write about is me and myself. In fact, everything I ever write is about me. But you are strange too. Sometimes it hurts thinking about it, but you never write back. You know as much as I do that there is not, and can never be a medium for us to connect. And our relationship is strange too. I try to reach you like a river, carrying loads and loads of myself, and you on the other side, sometimes rain down on me, wake me and warm me, and by sunlight, leave me alone, once again to wander the unknown terrains of the world, alone and by myself. But do you know that in those little moments of light when I get to feel you by my side, I feel you calling me, like you want me to reach you. A glimpse of your eyes looking at me and I see through you, and when I do, I am able to persist through your ever-fading image, and every time I try not to make it a dream.

Though ideal, I cannot help but want to call you out, stretch my hand and hold you in my arms. Do you know what happened yesterday? You came to my dream without a face. And the warmest moment was when you held me in your arms. But it was unfair how I could not hold you back. I felt so hopeless. Nonetheless, you were carrying me like a little baby and I felt enormously loved. You were so warm; you smelt like my mom. But something inside me felt bad about it. I could not love back. Why? I don’t know why you appear to me like that. Don’t you see me back, at least for once? If you did, you would know that all I want is to be able to touch the concrete you and hold you. I want to know you, better.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like I can reach you. If feels like you are so close to me, in fact the closest. But you know, as I am, flesh and bones, these clothes, the metal bar beside me, the paper I am writing on, and the ink I write with, I give up. I give up to something unknown.

I also think that someday you will stop reading my letters. After all, even I don’t know what I am writing about. It’s insignificant even when I lift my head or look out of my paper. But I want you to know that I will keep doing this. I will keep sending bits and bits of me to you forever, like a river, and you are an ocean to me whom I have taken for granted. Its hard that my letters are my only hope. But I am too afraid, because I am a man, though persistent, my body is doomed to fail, and one day, in the glimpse of eternity, I will too disappear like a smoke, forever, and then it pains me to think that even I will go away, just like you.

Yours 
Doy