A letter to my writer, from a repertoire.
You always write through me. I am the walker of all your stories. I live what you don’t, and you come back tired from life and scribble me in your diary.
I am not sure if you see how hard you try to use me to say things you’re afraid to say own your own.
I like you. I like that you give me different shapes and put me in different cities: sometimes a lonely poet and sometimes an expressive lover, dousing in melancholia of the past, making homes in the snow, and always having me find warmth in places you know I am least expected to.
But I am slowly starting to feel that you’re getting too lost in making me and so you forget about yourself. I wouldn’t have minded if you gave me a timeline and told me that you’re going to live inside me one summer and then move on. I am scared that the strokes you use in painting me have started to dry on your skin and you’re already coloured in layers you don’t understand, but can only write about.
Sometimes I want to be you.
Buy foolish teas and give them to every stranger that passes by your door and then regret not buying enough honey and lemon and then finally cursing the self for buying these fussy teas at all. Grief would be simple. But you keep them for yourself. All the weight of the more weighty grief you put only on me.
I get tired of it. Sometimes I want to not be in love and be happy doing ordinary things that normal people do. Things that you don’t like to write about, but only do when very few close people are watching.
You inhabit a mood cycle that worries me. It spills all over the surface taking whatever shape it finds first. That’s how you fall in love too. Fill in, fill out. Then why do you want me to be stuck with the picture of a love that is already fading on your window with all the extra sun exposure, while you are busy surfing on a cloudy desolate river mouth?
Sometimes I want to be free of your thoughts, but you’re holding too tight, busy building a road for yourself that you no more seem to have the energy to dig. Some mountains you can leave as mountains. Not every space you see is yours.
So stop writing for a bit, and live.
