Dear Ann,
How was life in high school? Are you still ditching your classes when you feel like not attending them? Are you still friends with Rose? How does it feel hugging Mama and having an every-night conversation with Papa whenever he gets drunk? He would wake you up at night, along with AJ and Daisy, just to lecture about life and how you should live it. Believe me, I miss those.
I dropped the pen and let it roll on the table, not continuing my letter. Pain drummed in my chest as I was writing a letter to my 14-year-old self. Tears damped my gloomy cheeks as I reminisce about my old life, wishing I could relive it. I couldn’t stop the poignant memories flooding my mind. They were so vivid, I felt I was living in the past, as if my current room wasn’t existing. The present time wasn’t existing.
I’m no longer in high school. I’m already working—a job I’m forced to embrace because it’s stable… teaching. Although my childhood dream was to become a teacher, it all changed when I was in high school. I fell in love with writing, and I just couldn’t let it go. However, recently—after being on hiatus from writing—I felt like my passion didn’t love me back. I couldn’t write anything, but a sigh of frustration and disappointment for not being productive. It made me feel that I didn’t belong in the world of writers. The world I so long wished I could live in.
Back then, even now, socializing had been so difficult for me. I always felt I didn’t fit in. Or was it I who preferred to isolate myself? Being an introvert was both fulfilling and heartbreaking. I would long for belongingness, yet I always felt like an alien. So, I ended up backing off not to make things awkward for me and the people I was trying to reach out to.
Perhaps, I had felt like isolating myself because I distrusted some people, especially the ones who used to be part of my life. Rose was no longer my friend. I blocked her on Facebook; I even blocked her from my life altogether. Who would’ve thought friendship with her could be suffocating to the point that I couldn’t breathe? I couldn’t live the life I want with her around, so I banished her from my realm. She was part of the previous chapters of my story, not wanting her to be part of the present. After all, I had learned to ditch my classes because of her. That alone was a sign I shouldn’t have spent time with her then.
Mama and Papa? I would forever miss them! Just thinking about their smiles, and the sound of their voices when they talk and laugh, would make me want to be a child again. Memories with them were blissful but agonizing. Blissful, because it was Mama and Papa who never failed to make me feel accepted and loved. That whoever I might’ve been and whoever I might’ve become, they would always embrace and never abandon me. Agonizing because losing them would always be the most tragic part of the story of my life. The emotional injuries I had obtained from losing them would never heal. Those injuries would never scar because they would never heal. There was no moving on from losing both parents who always made me feel I belonged.
