One day

This probably belongs to the few rare spontaneous things I've ever done in my life, but I did write an email at 3 in the morning to a person that I've been avoiding for a very long time. I am not an person of eventful history. There is only so much memory I can actually hold on to. I don't want the ending of this part of the memory stay the same until I die. I want to give it a good ending. Or at least attempt to do that. Maybe the person won't even see that email. But at least I tried.




Hi,

How are you? It’s been a while since we last talked, and the last time we did it ended sort of strange. Every time when I’m reminded of, for whatever reason, the four years of pure nothingness between us, who could have become really good friends, I think again and again of my stupidity. I have long forgotten the reasons for why I did what I did; all I was left with was the mystically determined will that I must continue doing what I had been doing, which was nothing. I used silence as a defensive mechanism for starting and ending something I did not quite understand, and that costly price was a friend. From time to time in the past four years, I’ve gone back reflecting on those meager bits and pieces of memory there were, and I realized uncountable mistakes I’d made and selfish things I’d done. Each time it put me to deeper shame. Deeper and deeper mortifying shame. I tried to lesson my own pain by running away from that shame. I didn’t realize the running away was a bigger mistake than any other mistake I had ever made. Now I see how petty these feelings were. How trivial the shame that stood between me and simply talking was. If I were given another chance, I wish I could have learned more about you, and been a better friend. I imagine one day, we would meet again on the streets of Fort Lee, maybe at the basketball court that you used to go, and I would say, Hey, haven’t seen you in a while. How’s life. But I know this is just a ridiculous and passively romantic imagination, so I’m writing you this letter to take the first step of filling that four years of gap.

I’m really sorry.

Xinyi