Letters to No One

When I was in school I was kind of known as a letter writer. At the end of every single class, my friends and I would meet in the hallway and I would distribute my soul on torn out notebook pages covered in colorful inks.

I couldn’t stop myself. A letter for everyone I would be chatting with later. Always. Repeatedly. Multiple times each school day.

And sometimes… Sometimes that wasn’t enough. Sometimes I would even write letters to no one. Sometimes I would run out of people I knew I was going to see, but I still felt the need to write more. To be perfectly honest with you, looking back on all of this in class writing I used to do, I have no idea how I passed any of my damn classes. How could I have been paying attention and writing so much? It is so maddening to think about when now I struggle to focus on and accomplish three separate tasks in one day!

Lately, I have been feeling the pull back to my letters to no one, and, with our current global state I feel it even more strongly. I was going to open a notebook and just begin writing, but I knew it wouldn’t work — too many years of writing morning pages has morphed that exercise into something completely different. Then I remembered another thing about most of letters to no one: they were read by someone. At the end of the day I would announce to my friends that I had also written a letter to no one and ask if anyone wanted it. Letters to no one were kind of always meant to be read. Remembering that made the solution clear.

I needed to get back to blogging. I mean, what is a blog, after all, but a shout into the ether? When you begin it is nothing but letters to no one — words typed out with a nebulous destination, always written knowing someone might read them, but more than likely would not. Words that need to get out of you and into the open and who the hell cares where they end up? There’s nothing dangerous in them, or harmful… they are just bits of you that are dancing around in your head and need more room to stretch. Perhaps all of this talk of quarantine has me dreaming of bigger things for my tiny captives. Perhaps all the new thoughts and worries are crowding up the brain-space and I need to evict something for my own sanity.

I can’t say for sure.

All I can say is I am back and I come to you without a plan or a purpose except to spill out a bit of me here. I’m not sure who is still here reading, if anyone, but that’s okay because, for now, I am writing to no one.