Yet Untitled 155 - An Unsent Letter to Distant Friends
More a letter to myself on the subject of friends
Dearest Yet Untitler,
This weekend, I attended a play about writing letters.
Epistles. Missives. Those things.
You may remember from a past instalment that the act of writing letters is of interest to me. It’s also kind of obvious as I’m doing it every week, writing letters to you!
The play was unconventional, held not in a theatre, but in someone’s living room. There was music, there was food, there was significant audience participation, all around the theme of unshared sentiments - expressed in the form of letters that were never sent. Some of us in the audience were invited to stand in for the people who these letters were addressed to. Others were put in the place of the absent senders, asked to read in their stead. Accompanied by the wonderful music of acoustic duo Meera Desai and Anusha Ramasubramoney, Unshared Childhoods was refreshing, memorable and poignant.
It’s a powerful thing, to provide an avenue for withheld sentiments. I know it. Many times, this page here has been just that sort of outlet for me. Watching ‘Unshared’ made me think about things I’ve been wanting to express coherently but somehow haven’t managed.
Triggered thus, I thought I’d do… a ‘letter within a letter’? Not the most novel of ideas, not something I haven’t attempted before, but…
The subject:
Friends I’ve lost connection with (and how I feel about that).
Initially, I started writing this instalment in a general tone, addressed to you, reporting my thoughts and feelings as I usually do. After watching the play, I thought that perhaps, if I address the intending recipient of my letter (an amalgam of many friends whose orbits have drifted from mine), perhaps it’ll draw out something more significant, more personal?
Not much more to be said than…
…‘here goes’ 👉🏼
Dear friend
You are and have been very important to me. There’s stuff that has passed between us that - to my mind - cannot leave us as strangers. Ever. Perhaps even beyond this life. It feels this way to me.
It puzzled me, though, that you may not feel the same way. I know this from the way we meet these days, the way we coexist in a world in which we are essentially always standing right next to each other.
Let me remind you, nonetheless:
What of that time when you were going away and I surprised myself by telling you that I’ll miss you when you’re gone, only because you were one of the very few people I could talk to about things that really mattered to me. I remember how your expression changed. I think you realised that you had misjudged me and regretted that we didn’t speak more in the time we coexisted in the same place. Even thought it was a temporary goodbye, I remember feeling that it was a moment of tremendous import, because we didn’t like each other so much before that, but in that moment we transcended that difference.
I think you’ve forgotten this. Or chose not to remember. Or chose to remember other things. I didn’t forget. This is the kind of thing I don’t forget, and for good reason. Things like this keep bringing me back to who I am, no matter where life takes me.
Perhaps this projects that my complaint is a selfish one, where I’m accusing you of denying me some perspective on myself. But, friend, I think it’s more than that.
I’m thinking about why this affects me in the first place because I’m spoilt when it comes to friends: I have a collection of enduring friendships scattered across the world.
But hold on!
It feels like I’m talking about some stamp collection, which it isn’t. However, since I used the word, maybe it tells me something. Since I always wanted my collections to be complete - to have the full set of He-Man toys that could be bought in the market - perhaps I’ve allowed that instinct to kick in here.
Let me correct myself. My friends are not a collection. They are my tribe, a living thing in itself; an extension of me. Each one, including you, my friend, is a mirror who at some stage has shown me an aspect of who I am. In this, there’s delight. There’s meaning.
Have I done enough for you, my friend?
What about the time when we jumped into the pool together in solidarity after you received your rejection from the college you really wanted to attend? Or the time when you told me the story about how you believed that your sister’s spirit miraculously lit a faulty street lamp for you when you passed under it?
At the very least, I’ve kept a part of you in my safekeeping. I realise while writing to you that this is not a transaction. When I think back to the part of you that I hold in my life and how it’s travelled with me, not as some additional weight, but as an intrinsic part of my identity, all I can think of doing is to thank you.
It took some doing, though, coming round to this place. It took writing this letter.
Ah, friend, I’m so glad I wrote to you. It’s freeing. You know what’s interesting - I let go of a rope that I had held on to tightly, only to realise when I let go that there was nothing pulling at the other end.
I look forward to our next meeting.
Your friend still,
V
Thanks for listening.
Lots of love
V
PS. If you could write a letter to someone and had a way to do this without them actually reading it, who would it be to? And why?
Tell me. I want to know!
And…
Also…
PPS. If any of you want to know more about ‘Unshared Childhoods’, all information can be found below:
Great great great missive. I have a many longtime friendships, and many longtime no-longer-friendships, and I think about both a lot. It resonates that your friends are not a collection. Mine are "me", part of who I am and who I became and who I was and who I will be. These relationships are never over because time is an illusion. I can see you across the lunch table in Chandigarh right now-- the young floppy hair, pent-up wonder, the bottomless loyalty. My childhood friends are with me within the smile that pokes through when I pick up a pen and realize it's writing with pink or purple or turquoise ink, I see the lines of blank pages from that time, all potential. I have learned so much from friends' lives and their stories, I have spent my decades drinking in and digesting how to live and love and be through the people I have known, what they learned, how they shared themselves. I have a gift for recognizing good advice and ideas meant to be replicated in my life when I hear them from other people-- like a bell dinging: this one, this one is for you to do, Ashley.
I think too much about the broken friendships. I wish I could stop thinking about those ones. The thinking-about-them doesn't serve me. It's grief being reworked, over and over. I have rarely pointedly wronged people, but I myself have been discarded, for either reasons unknown, unspoken, or frankly not good enough. I wish I could see now that they were not for me even when our lives were building huge moments and dreams together. I do wish I could adore the people who value me with ten times the ferocity I grieve the ones who didn't. I succeed with some.
When you've had magnificent friendships, the rest of the mundane world is so beige. Because of Alexander I've spent some long years isolated, and became used to isolation. When my magnificent friends came through it always made everything harder when they left. Knowing that kind of love and not getting to keep having it is so painful, a kind of unfair that feels fish-brain primal. I can understand why people who experience loss often choose to close themselves off, to stop responding, stop answering the phone. It's easier not to be heartbroken later. I never chose that, but I saw the allure.
I'm in a new world right now, having just moved. I intend to live where I am now until I pass. I'm being careful but not cautious, honest with myself, open to hearing truth when it rings. As a 51 year old woman with a disabled child and some big-time lifetime health stuff, I cannot fling myself at the world like my nature wants to, tries to. I am in a time of re-re-reflection on the nature of friendship, and I think a lot about who I should bring along with me into this new world from my "before-now". I am a reforming people-pleaser-out-of-necessity; being the mother of a disabled child makes me a liability in some people's eyes. North America is a deeply diseased culture that dismantles community with distractions and the glorification of independence, and makes you buy it all back with money. I think a lot about how I should use my time (and physically where I should put myself) in order to make sure I only move toward people who have the capacity to appreciate the twinkle of good chaos and that flails along in my wake.
Wish me luck, V!