An Open Letter to Words

A barrage of words shot straight at my heart, every punctuation mark and inflection a death sentence to what used to be my feelings. Every day, I live through pain and destruction and I realize that it is hard to hold on to things that I have never even begun to know. That I am legally an adult but in all other ways a complete child.

You open books and watch movies and fall in love and hate characters, but then they are fiction. They are not real. You get affected by every damn thing the world throws at you and it is just so hard to keep everything in at times. You scream. You cry. You sing in the shower even if you're tone-deaf. You write letters and songs and poems and think you're the next big thing to come to the world just waiting to be discovered, but then there are others just like you.

You feel so angry. You feel so sad. And helpless. And drowning.

And it claws at your chest, so hard, that breathing becomes a pain and you wish that you can curl up and forget existing. Anything to take that pain away.

Sometimes you just become so angry you don't even know where it's coming from. But it's there.

Sometimes you just become so sad that the tears just keep flowing, and you can't answer the questions of "what happened" and "what's wrong" because frankly, you don't know.

Each time the words come to me I write them down. I may not know what they mean just yet. But I know that right now, it hurts, and I am telling the world that silver platters and soothing nothings are just ways to make you feel better even if the world is falling apart. Because that is the reason for their existence. To keep the waves of depression in bay.

These words, they come in a hurricane. These words, they come in disorder, but with purpose, with meaning. We may not understand it just yet, but there is a reason why we put words together in ways to make people feel something they are not feeling right now.

And right now, this is what these words are trying to say.

This is not a perfect piece. I may have made a lot of errors along the way, but I'm either too scared or too sad to check. It doesn't help making me feel less angry.

You. Yes you, the person who is reading this right now.

You may not like this piece. You may even hate it, then hate me for making you feel something you don't want to feel. But try to understand. These words came together because they are supposed to, right at this moment. At another point in time they will group together differently, dance in tongues and pages to different tunes, but right now they are in this place for this moment.

Or maybe for some reason you like it. Or there is an unsettled feeling in your chest. Or maybe something calm. I don't know, I can't predict how things are supposed to make anybody feel, like how a red balloon can make an old man laugh or cry.

Or just maybe, it can make you understand something. Even just a tiny bit.

It's okay if you don't. I'm not sure if I even understand things myself.

But I'll be fine. We'll all be fine.

We just need these hurricanes once in a while.