I love writing, love letting words pour onto a page. No matter what I write, it is always to someone. I am always writing for an audience of one. I’m trying to get away from this habit (constraint?), and failing (gladly).
Years ago I participated in a group therapy session which forever changed me. In it, the therapist instructed each of us to write notes to someone in our lives to whom we had a lot to say. The rules were nonexistent, beyond this prompt.
Some wrote to those who had hurt them, others to those who had saved them, others to someone in between.
After writing these letters, we burned them.
In a metal bowl our ashes of words unsaid sat, and we held a moment of silence, releasing nothingness (peace) into the air.
After the ashes cooled we laid them at the foot of a fledgling bush. Those ashes, those burnt words, mingled with the soil, replenishing the earth.
There they remain, returning to where they originally, always, are.
I had forgotten that moment until now, until I realized I have things to say to people I cannot, not directly. I want to write notes to no one, to share the words I haven’t, can’t, but must anyway.
Notes to those I love too much to ever utter aloud, notes to those I no longer know but think of regardless, notes to people who have passed, notes to lost chances, notes to myself.
Notes to no one.
Instead of burning these, this time I’ll leave them here for anyone who may come across them. This is me, sliding the ashes of my thoughts back into the ground, the source, where they belong.
To a friend who died before I could say goodbye:
I spent the morning propagating plants and thinking of you.
You, one of the first who introduced me to the beauty of the natural world.
You, who showed me that plants are like people. Gorgeous and complex, obvious and mystifying. Looking for and receiving, first and foremost: love.
I’m thinking of you.
You died a few months ago, and I found out a month later, and it snapped me in two. Cut me in a way I didn’t know I could be.
You left, and I searched frantically for a way to turn back time, and when I couldn’t, I gave up all hope that I’d ever see the beauty of the world again, that I’d ever know a life without fear.
You told me in your last note to me that you had gotten better, were in remission, and that your illness had reminded you how grateful you were to be alive. I exhaled, reading this, remembering the simplicity of that, of life, of how beautiful it can be when we just remember this, that we are here, that we are.
And then you left.
You left this earth and when it happened my eyes were inadvertently closed to your returned suffering, blissfully ignorant. Learning of this later – my inattention – soured me, filled me with resentment and regret.
I’ve said countless times these last few months, to anyone who will listen:
I just want a chance to say goodbye.
So this is that, me, saying it, finally.
Goodbye my friend.
You filled fields with flowers and you filled my heart with love.
I learned from an obituary I found online that your body is being composted, that it will be sent back to the soil.
How very you, I thought, and I laughed, remembering. You’re here. And you know this. You loved life, and you still do, in a new form.
How lush, the gardens that will grow from you.
I want to say goodbye.
I want to tell you that every time I touch something green I think of you. That every time a person touches my heart I know you are still here, that your presence radiates.
I want you to know that you were loved by me, by so many, and by this world which was made brighter for having you in it.
Most of all, I want to thank you. For reminding me that life is gorgeous, and deliciously short, and worth it.
With all my body and heart I say goodbye to a friend who left too soon and who also, somehow, has never left me once, not at all.