Letter #1 To My Best Friend

Dear Neha,

A first letter, hopefully of many!

It’s strange to me that only two years of our friendship consisted of seeing each other face to face more than a few times a year. It feels like it was longer, which makes me think we’d still be here if it had been shorter, but it’s still strange that four years + the foreseeable future was and will be friendship from afar. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, especially since it’s been an utterly unproblematic journey so far. I do love seeing you in person though; I always get reminded of how much I love you, and that our friendship is not just the serendipitous result of proximity and time together in high school, but because some unchanging part of our persons click into each other well.

Do you enjoy reading endings more than beginnings? I was thinking more about why I might enjoy writing beginnings more than endings and you the opposite, and although writing preferences seem to relate to reading preferences I wasn’t sure about this one. I like that a readers’ mindscape starts completely bare, and that your first few words color a person or interaction or world into it. As a reader, I get excited by the fact that the world that’s being created is one that I couldn’t have imagined on my own, but now it lives in my head and I can think about it however and whenever I want. It’s almost like the ending is inconsequential when you look at it that way, because once I have the world and the character and the vibe they’ll live out stories in my mind even past the conclusion…