LETTERS TO REALITY ✓

YOONGI

LETTER SEVEN
To Min Yoongi

How are you?

How the fuck are you?

Tell me because I've spent days and nights wondering if you're simply okay... If you're alive... Because we haven't talked in forever.

Anyway. I'm going to start this letter again, sorry.

I'm finding it hard to start your letter... Is it because it's the last letter or maybe because you're that meaningful to me? You've lost meaning in my life and yet writing this to you, for you, feels far too personal.

Before I knew it, we were tired of each other.

In all of these meaningless emotions.

As I walk through the scattered yet turbulent crowds of people shopping, awakened for the Christmas season, a boy walks past, smelling exactly like you used to. It's the same boyish and provocative cologne that stuck to your blue, ashen hoodies which I'd close my eyes to appreciate. In high school, everyone always used to say to you- you smell so nice!

It makes me freeze as my chest tightens because there's so much that reminds me of you.

You were like tough music in the background, comfortable solitude, deep breaths of crisp air whenever you'd step out of the house, listening to ocean waves, the soft glow of moonlight in an overcast room that's strangely pleasant, modern loneliness, the gentle pitter-patter of rain on the roof, keeping a scruffy journal, halting but hopeful smiles and sunshine peeking through clouds after a storm.

Repeated seesaw game. We're getting tired of each other.

You were my first love. My first relationship. Someone who fixed me yet broke me. How insane does that sound? How insane do I sound?

Is there really a need to keep repeating ourselves? Saying this was love and this is love?

We went to school together ever since we were children, thrown into the education system. We went from learning how to read and learning the alphabet, to playing badminton, to falling in love with each other and lastly... Falling out of love with each other.

High school was a ghastly experience for both of us. It's a place we'd never come back to, yet a part of me is thankful for that institution. We wouldn't have become us. We wouldn't have become closer. We wouldn't have discovered our want for each other. We wouldn't have fallen in love.

Stainless, unbelievable love.

A love that I gave too much importance to, which made me waste away years, focusing on the wrong things and ideas. The expectations I had of love never lived up to reality.

A repeating seesaw game. It's about time we put an end to it.

We started dating in not so scary, tenth grade. You asked me to be yours in the summer before that, on my birthday and I said yes without hesitating at all because god, you made me feel welcome and exceptional. You made me feel like I deserved to be alive.

You came into my life and bombarded me with love when I needed it the most. I was struggling with depression, a mental illness that made me feel worthless, made me cry every night and made me crawl into a corner. I never knew where the depression came from, the reasons are still unclear.

We stayed a secret at school. You holding my hand under tables, you staring at me and me hiding my face, incredibly shy. I couldn't even make eye contact with you because everything was unfamiliar. Love was new to me. I guess my insecurity indicated to a lot of people that we were something more than friends. But then again, immature kids in school like to put labels on everyone. Labels that can afflict.