A Fernando Letter- Babbling Blurs.

Catherine,

I think of all the people that I've been; I think of the child that I once was. And I cringe to consider all the things that went unrecorded because of insecurities and hang-ups. Perhaps if I had written some of the things down that I felt as a child I would be able to read them now and know myself better.

I was always afraid to write, afraid to see so plainly infront of my own eyes what I was, what I thought. So, I buried myself in books and wrote about the characters I knew. I understood them because I could empathize.

The distant past sits in my memory as something I only pull out in parts and I twist it to highlight whatever point I seem to be making at the time. I let it simmer; I let it boil away, unused and barely touched. Only the recent past lives in my full view and all the rest is history. I try to attach it to recent experience. But, I fear that the older I get the less I remember being young. Things that were once full-blown, life-changing, emotonal episodes are now only distant, dimly-lit stories and what was once real life is now left, lost to anecdote, to the simple telling of a tale.

It is the people, though. It is the people who live inside me, who peer out from behind my eyes, people whom I haven't seen in years materialize in my daily visions and I cannot let them go. I cannot help but wonder and I cannot stop wondering. I often become so caught up in the people who peer out at me from the corners of my peripheral vision that I am distracted and the people infront of me become babbling blurs.

I wonder if this is a common thing, if many people face these same heartaches, these same problems with memory. I imagine they do and yet it makes me feel no better. I already understand that I am human. It changes nothing.

Unchanged and Unwilling,
Fernando