Letters: To Sylvia

Dear Sylvia,

I read your journal today and I wonder what it must have felt to be you during your time. I find it sad that you had to end your life so quickly because people like you are quite hard to find especially in my day. There aren't a lot of people I can relate to like how I relate to you as you talk about yourself in your journal. There aren't a lot of people who are able to articulate themselves like you and remain available to people like me (albeit in paperback form).

I was talking to Adi this morning about how you write and how the words just breathe with life. She says your writing sounds timeless like your voice spans many different eras.

Well, it has sure reached mine. I know I've put you in the corner of one of my shelves in my room primarily because the picture on your front cover was a little bit scary to me and that time I just watched a movie that they made about you. I didn't want any haunting thoughts to surmise while I was in bed looking at the ceiling. Still, I admire your writing and I wish I could write in my journal beautifully like you do.

It's break time and I'm here just swimming in my thoughts while at work dreading the thought of a 6 hour meeting talking about issues that remain unsolvable while the cycles of discussions just go on and on and on.

I pulled out your journal just now and scanned through the page I read earlier this morning finding myself drawn to these words.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter--they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

How apt that you describe something I'm actually grappling with right now. Oh this dreadful feeling of not being able to say what I want to say! Has that happened to you? It doesn't seem so. You ramble so flawlessly on the page it feels like you're this running brook all set to conquer the sea.

How ironic it is about your life that you find it so ghastly and senseless and here I am reading your thoughts in the 21st century and I wish you were alive today so that I could talk to you about them. Not so much to find answers really, but just to sit with and know that even in the fragile tensions of this life, connections can be made in the intimate conversations of two human beings which have become so rare nowadays in this technological age.

I hunger for that kind of interaction.

I'll be reading a little bit more in a few moments and perhaps will be writing a little bit more in the next few days. I find it easier to get my thoughts out in the open and catch the words to describe them when I'm writing them to somebody like you.