Dear T.,
I have been thinking of you for a while. Are you thinking of me as well?
It seems like yesterday when we first met, and yet a whole year has gone, the weeks sliding down each other. I had been talking about you for even longer. What have we been doing all this time? You always look the same, and yet you are so different. You are different from how I first remember you, different from how people expected you to be. But I like it, you are unpredictable – a good thing in some ways. It has its own beauty, this idea.
Our story started a long time ago – it might even have roots in the dreams of a 19 years old, who decided that she was called to make history, to study it, to discuss it. How unpredicted that was too! Nevertheless everything since then seems to have brought us together.
What am I to you? In some ways I made you, I brought you to life – am I your mother? If so, you are such a rebel child! I should have raised you better educated. But no – I feel like our relationship is much more passionate and complicated. I think we are lovers. Actually, I am the lover – the one who will never know if they are reciprocated. I am chasing you, I am idealising you – sometimes it happens that I neglect you, it is true. The point is that you respond to my affection so rarely that sometimes I doubt of your existence too! Are you a product of my imagination? Will we ever do something together? What will become of our story?
I am sorry, I am rambling now. The fact is that I do not know why I wrote this letter to you. Maybe it is because of our recently celebrated anniversary, and I feel nostalgic. The past months have not been easy, for none of us. No matter how hard we tried, we grew apart. It is not that something really wrong happened between us, but we lacked of communication, of consistency. Forced to be together, excluded everything else from our lives, we found ourselves tired and demotivated. I am taking this chance to apologise: I am sorry, we only had each other, and yet I rejected you.
Things feel different now, anyway. At the celebration of our anniversary, I am more serene. The difficulties we have been through changed me, and this change made me understand what you mean to me. I chose you for a reason, I fed our love for a reason – I only forget it sometimes, forgive me, I am growing with you. I make you a promise for the future: I will never think of us as a burden again, but as a courageous and beautiful life choice.
Forever yours,
G.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
Giovanna Pasquariello is Vice-Chair for “Pubs and Publications: the PhD experience”. She’s a second year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, working on something old, very old: Greek inscriptions about the Celtic tribes who settled in Anatolia in 3rd BC. Apart from this, she swears she is a fun person.
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