A letter from Sep 27, 2024

Kim, You're writing a poem and the unfinished skeleton of it goes like this: "Someone’s kicked you to sea—are you holding on? Feathered fingers splintered, skin pulled tight and an angry red from gripping, eyes searching. You imagine salt catching in the breaks of your board, froth speaking like new dawn. You imagine your parts crushed beneath the sky’s palm, a rhythm spreading you so thin no speck of dust could come back together. A quiet fear lives inside you—of bleeding, of remaining. You imagine light touching the core of your cradle, seeping so clear your bones break like glass. Would you let go then?" And then there's probably a part in the middle, and then you wrote this: "You dock at a harbor; the sand is warm. The wind blows by like fingers combing through your hair, trickling down to fine fibers and grain. Something turns, then—what has been beside you, and with you, all this time." There's a mk.gee song you listened to that you love, that you played on repeat yesterday while feeling awful by yourself, then played again when in the company of people that you love. And you found yourself changed, forgetting what ever made you cry in the bathroom in the first place. You don't need to feel so isolated from that person you were at thirteen. "Who could ever not like you?" your friend asked. You laughed, for what I still don't know, but then she said, without a trace of a smile, "No, seriously. Who could ever?" Perhaps there's a little bit of a lie in it, since you yourself dislike many people (we're all human), but of all the people you know, why stick around, why know, those who don't like you? Nineteen is not a monumental age, I fear--between the limbo of eighteen, a marker of adulthood, and twenty, a teenager's first step into another uncertain landmarking decade, nineteen stands as something more humble. Nobody ever feels different the day of their birthday, only hours from some person they were last morning, but growth is a journey and it's important to cherish the steps along the wide way. "It's gonna be okay," you wrote to yourself last year. "I know it'll probably get harder from here on out, but you have people who love you, so maybe you should start loving yourself too." You don't need to feel so small all the time. Although you are not the person you were at thirteen, you are the same ship, from the same plank, from the same sweat. And there are people who have loved you in every single step of creation. Take care of yourself and happy birthday. Always yours, Kim