Dear Esther

To: A New Life

To: esther_cunningham@gmail.com

[Sent: 4:15 PM 2018 June 17]

To a New Life,

I never thought I would actually write these letters.

I never really felt the need to.

In all honesty, I never realized the importance of dictating my own thoughts until it was much too late to record them. The words would lump in my throat, stuck between my lungs and ribcage, stuttering to a stop against the back of my teeth before they even had a chance to present themselves openly and honestly. It becomes all too apparent the importance of leaving behind something—anything—to look back on much too late.

Always too late.

But you knew that already.

So, I write to you now.

To you, a new life, a different life.

One that I only hoped I would be able to lead, a possibility, fleeting in thought before it was fully actualized. Instead of furling out slowly, taking your time to grow and learn and create, you crashed across the playing field in a thunderstorm of collected emotion and stubborn pride. You came into your own on your own, which allowed you, I think, to become independent and confident in the person you eventually became. But it was not without a price, regardless of how well your life was planned or how little you tried to care about the perceptions of other people.

We begin our lives in such disarray—dependent on another to function—and leave just the same. I think of you, a different me, as someone who had not realized the depth of her own truths.

I took you for granted, I think.

I let you slip out of my fingers.

Childhood becomes precious only in retrospect, when we no longer think in terms of the future, but in terms of the past.

And the younger years flew by, so I remember.

•••

You came into the world screaming.

At least, that's what Catherine told me. She said you screamed so loudly you almost burst a lung, and that's how she knew what a terror you'd be as a child.

She wasn't entirely wrong.

Instead, you grew from a spark into a flame, tearing through everything in your path regardless of what lay ahead. Headstrong and bullheaded, is what Trevor always said. Stubborn to a fault, even when if concerned the wellbeing of other people. Eventually, your tenacity will strike in a way that cuts deeply. And it wasn't always something that you directed at other people.

A flame can burn anyone.

And you never really found out how to control that fire.

•••

When you were five, you knew something was different.

You didn't have the language then—you didn't even know there was a language to begin with.

But I'll remember for you.

This life—your precious life—came to a sudden halt when the realization struck that not everything was experienced the same way by different people. You had taken one look across the playground at the neighborhood park and realized suddenly that two distinct worlds existed and you fit neatly into neither—the world of girls and boys a battlefield littered with colors that took the places of names, their own worlds spinning infinitely in space.