Hello friends.
What would your last letter look like?
There’s a queue of things I wrote awhile back, with a few filed in from years prior. But it’s all on standby now. Standby, because… Which ones are worth sharing?
It’s hard to say. Why does anyone follow you to begin with? You may garner some hints in spare comments and nudges-as-likes – though we pray to never fall to praise, nor spar with criticism as though we ought to make it all aright.
Really, I don’t know. But I don’t think you can give an answer either. Happenstance rules over us both once more, I suppose. Happenstance as our darkened hill hoisting bittersweet nightshades. Glowing – a signal to pay respects by joining their farewell sunrise.
Some could view a final letter as a gracious thing. Because life works out otherwise most often than not.
You just won’t know what your last words will be to those that fade away. It just happens, then you incidentally immortalize a discussion about ramen in this shared tapestry. A good way to end a relation as anything else.
In our fragility so our creations seem so strangely grandiose and sturdy. Corpus after corpus of fairytale to mystery surrounding our shared understanding of how this world works. Perhaps you took the same turn long ago: to let it all drape around and if you find a thread or two that’s enough for the day. Anything more you’ll find yourself tangled with the pillow fort all ruined.
In a gracious final letter, perhaps the author wouldn’t make it that much different. If anything one could only hope it’d accentuate what makes a good one, maybe. Would you happen to know?
Well, the best letter is the in-person visit, I’d reckon. Though if you can’t manage that, then a blank page works too. And if that feels too rude, then – if you can keep yourself together and not think about the endless combinations of sentences, and if you can stave away the despair of this severing, wondering if a final letter ought to be anything at all but a waste of time – then I submit you must write the one you would most enjoy writing.
If you enjoy writing it enough, your enjoyment imbues itself into each word to be felt. May as well burn a bit brightly if we’re snubbing it by nightfall.
What makes writing enjoyable is the question of this twilight ending, isn’t it?
Enjoyable writing comes from taking each word as brick and building a canal bridge. Or taking each word as flotsam to straddle along until the next island hits. Each word as crumb leading curious mice in circles and letting them forget long-ago traps. With enough sentences maybe the piece conforms at once to the shape of the soul writing them, and cradle those reading them.
The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
Maybe one could challenge whether the enjoyably written is also congruent to the enjoyably read. As long as it isn’t a satire where the reader is the target, then this seems to be generally true. And even in that exception, with enough humor perhaps such targets will find some mirth in it too!
No legend lasts which lacks a sway for the teller to fare with. So he mimicks the cyclops with a guttural roar! And she leans in to whisper the scandals of the third princess. Both clutching a chest for the military burial – a mixture of resentment, fondness, and shame simmering from the veiled.
I guess we could conclude how the best writings are those which allow us to feel something once more, something new. Like addicts. The same way some play-actors reach a catharsis through their character’s demise, so us in the crowd could find a catharsis of our own.
Caught in the world’s current so we can cling onto our stories and soften the crash into each sharp turn.
With enough words the very way one interacts with the world changes, too! We can feel some stoic resolve, a popular drugline amongst the more practically oriented toward Solving The Current.
One may even find an enjoyment in ironing out some awkward emotions. Like writing how it feels a little sad and strange to wonder if we’re meant to drift from emotion to emotion in this void.
Because only then you could hope to tie it all up and toss it out: like how such words fall flat when attending your daughter’s quinceañera.
We’re fated to keep blooming, I suppose. Perhaps master the art until each moment is the same as a nap in the world’s Lotus. But blooming a bit more from whatever does delight you is a good enough start as anything else.
If you do have a final letter to write, I can only hope you write it with as much mirth as you’ll ever muster – well, effortlessly we could hope. As it seems that which is effortless is most often most enjoyable.
A channel into emotion.