The Words I Never Said // A Collection of Essays

Letter #20 // Befriending reality and growing plants

My dear Friend.

Hi.

I've seemingly felt words emerging and stirring, sentences meddling with each other, I thought I finally had something to write to you, yet it got lost somewhere on the way. We all grow. Enlarging, lengthening, and expanding our entire existence resides in human nature. No wonder we grow out of some things, old exoskeletons become too tight. I feel that writing to you is precisely that type of ossified skeleton, at least with how I've been doing it until now. No, I can't simply stop writing, however, I do begin to understand how the meaning of these letters must change from roots up. Recently, I've grown like crazy, in fact, I basically leaped up — it's strange how no tendons were ripped. All my previous letters to you now suddenly appear so trivial, naive, birthed by blindness and stupidity. No, I'm not planning on deleting them; in any way, they'll forever remain a significant testimonial to my delusional era. And every era has its purpose in the broad chronology of life.

I can't say I learned something revolutionary novel. Were these letters no more than an expression of my hopeless loneliness? Undoubtedly. As I found your reflections in other people, did I really just project my fantasies onto them, hyperbolizing reality a thousand-fold and then presenting it as the purest proof of those fantasies? Of course. As I aimed to convince myself of their love for me, did I really just feverishly bolt from the necessity of loving oneself and from the belief, the trust that when the time is right, you'll come and I won't have to try, search, contemplate or ponder, for everything will become abundantly clear? Absolutely. I knew all those things before. Yet for some reason a few days ago, as I got to most genuinely soak them into my being, even if only from a vicarious experience, I lived through these knowings so freshly that in an astounding synthesis they became a new wisdom, one comprehensible on a much deeper level than just the rational, one that calmed me and grounded me so incredibly that now writing letters to you in the same sense as I did before seems rather illogical. Time is not linear. Past, present, and future are all the same. Hence, our paths have crossed already. For now, I haven't yet got terms sophisticated enough to accurately describe the way I experience time, but one day I'll revisit it and expand on it.

Whenever I saw you in people, there was no clarity. There was no peace or tranquility either. On the contrary, I curled up into a tiny nervous ball and rolled over the sand dunes shaped by the winds of circumstance, building one fantasy onto another, diving into a third and then fourth illusion. All those times I so pathetically distanced myself from any sort of clarity. I believed in the significance of complexity whereas simplicity I saw as peasanty. In other words, I was the snobbiest of all snobs. Almost an entire year has passed since I gave in to my imagination and in total vain I prayed for it to manifest into reality, seeing the latter as the most boring, depressing formation that I utterly hated, that I was afraid of, despite knowing of its accuracy. This explains all those counterintuitive fears of actually physically meeting those reflections of yours around whom my days used to revolve. Back then I thought I was wrong for letting myself get lost in those delusions, but that was not where I was mistaken. I made a tremendous mistake by thinking of reality as my greatest enemy. In actuality, it's spectacular, for nothing and no one else can provide you with such unfiltered truth. It's a consoling, embracing mother who teaches you to settle with what you see and what you hear. Yes, imagination will always have its role and purpose, but it's not her with whom my relationship has gone awry. Yes, only thanks to imagination I am a generator of these lines of symbols, an alchemist of those immaterial visuals that emerge in my mind. But if it wasn't for the unconditionally loving reality, I wouldn't be able to do any of that; I'd probably just fly away, leaving a gaping hole in the roof.

And thus I got to face reality, my savior, eye-to-eye. A heavy gulp of air left my lungs as I blissfully exhaled. I realized I was horribly wrong about all those people I mentioned here, and it was the most pleasant mistake I've ever made. When I learned this, I smelled freedom again, newly set-off saliva moistened my dry lips, my eyes glistened with tears, my muscles relaxed, and the tension wrinkles on my forehead smoothened. I used to be blinded by the colors your reflections shimmered with, my Friend, and I believed I knew exactly how you'd be. I simply ignored the fact I had encountered people entirely different from those my soul had been seeking, those whose descriptions I would scribble in starry notebooks, those whose silhouettes and outlines would emerge in my inner eye as I dreamt or let the visions run during sleepless nights. For some reason, I accepted these people as a benchmark for truth and I thought I had to wait for someone exactly like that. Perhaps this is why the realization I was wrong was so relieving: now I know I can and should expect more without simultaneously expecting anything specific. A total paradox, however, I'm sure those who ever juggled with any manifestation principles will get what I mean.