Dear E,
If you are receiving this, it probably took a few minutes of amateur internet sleuthing to track you down. Let’s get a few things straight out of the gate - this is not supposed to sketch you out or feel stalkerish. I am coming from a good place in life where the ground I walk on feels solid and the people I surround myself with are pretty wonderful and give me plenty of love.
The short version is I’m happily married, we have a couple of kids on the verge of leaving the nest, and their increasing independence is what has given me more time to reflect on my past and contend with my future.
I am not going through my life inventory and wondering what if, so much as wondering what ever happened to.
I am trying out something new - writing periodic thank you notes to people for a particular role they played in my life at a specific moment in time. This is my test run. You are one of those people.
High school was a time where I felt like my world was constrained to a provincial crowd of people in a suffocatingly small town - something that was probably in my head to a degree, but it was my lived reality all the same.
I was growing up where either my older cousins or younger siblings were always in school with me, in a household where both my parents were immigrants, so it felt like I did not have places in my life where what I did wasn’t in some way observed by folks who might judge me. It’s hard to try out new versions of yourself when you fear someone could expose your inauthenticity at any moment.
I always felt that the world was bigger and there were interesting people and new ideas to discover at the edge of my world, if only I could get somewhere else where people were interested in exploring and engaging with the world.
I’ll attribute it to adolescent naivete that it felt expansive or groundbreaking in some way for a kid from [small town] to connect with a friend of a friend pen pal I’d never met who was attending a small private high school in [another state], but hey, you listened to Joy Division, wrote terrific letters and had an asymmetric haircut, making you seem exotic in ways that life at home was not.
In my memory, we connected by chafing together against our respective shackles, real or imagined.
This is not to say that there was no scene of misfits when I was growing up - just that I did not know the people well enough to access it (I was about to write that I did not fit in with them, but caught myself). There’s always a scene like that in small towns. (In junior high, a skater kid a year ahead of me got suspended for wearing a t-shirt to class that read “F*** me up the butt.” So we obviously had rebels, I just didn’t run with them.)
I wish I still had your old letters, as I’m curious what they revealed about us both.
The summer before my senior year of high school, a fire that began in a nearby National Forest spread quickly. It destroyed our house. We rebuilt in the same spot, and were lucky in that it didn’t tear our family apart like it did some others we knew, but all the correspondence and most of the childhood photos from before age 17 were lost.
I can’t recall if the fire was what disrupted our writing, or if our whole pen pal thing had already run its course and we had simply moved on to the next focus of our attention by that point (College applications? Impatient rush into the excitement and novelty of adulthood?).
Something happened to end it, but in the distractions that took our focus away from swapping letters, I am remiss that I never got to thank you.
Exchanging letters with you was exciting - I felt like I could take risks and share ideas that I didn’t feel I could share with friends at home. Not having the letters themselves, all I have to go on is the positive residual feelings of getting an insider's view into the life of someone I considered to be a fascinating work in progress, someone who was coming into their form before my eyes.
Please accept this long overdue thank you note for bearing witness to my trial and error in days when I was testing out versions of who I might become. It felt urgent and important to have you writing back, and I’m grateful for your friendship in those days.
With gratitude,
CD