#scurf110 letter to a stranger: to the angel i once knew

wrote this almost two years ago. submitted to a handful of magazines. never heard back from some, got rejected from others.

You were bored, running out of options. The imaginary world always collapsing and recreating itself in your head. You were seldom tired, hungry or sleepy. You were over worked, under nourished and always on time. You were patient, pliable and unsure. You were a child of the circumstances around you. You were alone.

Each night, you would dream of insipid, but vibrant things. Gods your parents worshipped, office troubles your father had, exams your brother failed. Your dreams were seldom born out of your own engagement with the world. Always seeing the world from their shoulders, through their eyes. As if your own body was an afterthought. As if your own self was a burden.

At the start of every academic year, you would sit down and read cover to cover all yours and your brother’s literature books. You would devour the written word and then head towards mathematics books. Your mind did not know then, that what you ached for, was libraries and walls decked with bookshelves. And that you wanted to be lost in them.

Each morning you would get to school too early. Not another soul in sight. You would be alone, measuring the lengths and breadths of empty floors. Clueless, idling about in the empty classrooms, you’d write spellings of difficult words using chalk on the blackboard. The screeching sound the chalk grazing against the whiteboard, comforting you somehow. When the school bell rang at half past seven, you’d walk down to the assembly ground, waiting keenly to hear the news, the poem and the quote for the day. You’d try and sing along with the school choir humming imagined lyrics.

In your time alone, you’d contemplate the length an ant would have to walk in a day to get food. You’d scour through your school bag, to unearth that last scrap of paper, looking no one knows what for. Unread, unseen, crumpled in one corner, new, or forgotten. Once discovered, you’d devour every word on it.

You’d talk to yourself while taking a shit, gently allowing the words to fill in the space inside your small mouth. You’d recall the way your mom’s aunt had taught you to say “s”, without a lisp, and you’d train your tongue to settle between the teeth and produce that sound.

I don’t think you realise how you the reader, writer and collector of sentences came to my rescue. You became the crutch on which I tried to build the foundation of my new life. You, the hopeful loafer, idler, you, my keeper of hope. I learnt valuable life tricks from you like how to pretend to listen while simultaneously slipping into the recess of your mind.

You taught me how to tessellate between the emotions of your parents. Everywhere you went, you cast your gaze around, seeing everything, drinking in all the minute myriad details. The panoply of colours or the lack of them, the range of life, the garden variety emotions strewn around, all of life askew, and you’d absorb it, drip by drip, one moment at a time.

All this while you never called attention to yourself. Unnoticed, in a corner, usually by yourself, painted arrogant by everyone around. You exchanged humid glances without ever touching a thing. You were never not nice. Even when people never saw that in you.

A taciturn, nervous, sensitive child, I know so much about you, yet you continue to elude me. I do not know what went through your mind all those years. Unbidden thoughts must have visited you then, as they do now. I wonder how you coped with them.

How often did you feel lonely? Did you know that you were ‘lonely’? Where are all the letters you wrote for friends, cousins and your mother? Why did you never send those? What about those greeting cards? Where have you kept them buried? Why did you make up stories about lovers and wrote letters in different handwritings? Who did you want to impress? Did anyone read them? Was anyone impressed?

When faced with an obstacle however small, or big, why did you resort to writing letters? In your lengthy letters to your mother, where did you find the words from? You were seven when you wrote the first one. What was it about? How comforting was mathematics to you? Did it make you forget about your loneliness? Prone to terror, your heart was often in your mouth. Why did you not read more? Borrow more books from the school library. Why did you not make better friends? Or talk to the ones who were around? At 16 you ran away from home. Why did you go the house of the cold, insensitive friend? Why didn’t you do it before, sooner and later again?

I could go on and the list of questions on my mind is endless. But I don’t know if I should vex you anymore after all. There is one question, though, that haunts me the most.

How are you now?

I know where you are. You know me, and you see me now. Do you like how far we’ve come? Is this better than your expectations? Have we done okay?

I want to thank you for being with me during those grey times. I picture your small body. You holding your knees close to your chest, with those tiny flailing arms. At five, you were a rough, faint outline of who I am now. Your eyes, nose and lips barely creating much impact on that round face. A mop of dark brown hair, those button-y eyes, and those tiny, little fingers. You weren’t even a nail bitter. You were clumsy though.

I hope you know how much I love you. Your small, gentle, curious eyes, that alabaster face, those elfin features. I hope you know how far they have brought me. I hope you understand what all those years mean to us. You and me. One soul, one person. I have distanced myself from a lot of those people you knew, but not you. You should know that you exist at the centre of my being. You are quite literally my spirit. And that all of me would’ve been nothing without all of you. Where you end, I begin, full, rounded, perspiring at the edges of existence. Striving, striving, striving. Living together.

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Image: Cover of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk

Johnny Flynn playlists are saving my days these past few months.