Dearest Rachel –
In the midst of some of my worst days at work, I would occasionally spend my lunch breaks cruising through a site called PostSecret. It was – and is – a combination worldwide art project, confessional and therapy session. You might recognize some of the material that has been sent anonymously to the museum in Laguna Niguel, as various excerpts were featured in the following video (as I understand it, all the individuals holding the cards are actors; these aren’t their secrets, as such – but they are someone’s secrets, all the same):
Some of these secrets are silly:
It was a way to remind myself that, as awful as my life there was, there were plenty of other people worse off than me. For one thing, it wasn’t as if my life was all terrible – if nothing else, as bad as a work day could be, I could always come home to a smile, a hug, a kiss and a heartfelt “I love you” from you. That is something that far too few of us are able to have in our lives, no matter how much we might wish it or even possibly deserve it (although when one starts using the term ‘deserve’ when it comes to things like this, it all starts to get rather murky. As much as I see people who I might consider to be ‘worthy’ of love, I’m not the arbiter in their case; it’s really only up to the one they have affection for. But I digress).
For another, it wasn’t as if I had some horrible secret I kept from the world – and had to keep on keeping from the world – lest it utterly ruin me, should the word get out about me. And even if I did, I had you to confide in; there were no secrets between the two of us, that I know about (I mean, I guess there might have been things you never told me, or – much more likely – that you told me and I have since forgotten, so they are now forever to be considered mysteries about you). Either way, I had no need for this to become my outlet for such things, while in my day-to-day public I had to conceal those emotions and pretend I was completely put together. I can’t imagine how hard maintaining such a facade has to be for any of the folks that submit cards to PostSecret.
And yet, as I continue to try to deal with life after you, I find myself confronting a dichotomy in which either possibility that I might consider to be true (and it is rather a binary option – one or the other must be true) reflects badly on our past relationship somehow, and I don’t know how to resolve it.
To say that I couldn’t improve myself in your absence would be too hopeless.
To say that I’m better off without you would be too cruel.
Am I being too black-and-white here? It’s possible that, if I were to chart my life, your departure would be represented by a deep dive, as grief and misery overwhelmed me. From there, aside from the obvious option of simply letting it consume and destroy me, it could be argued that I had little direction to go but up. I had to improve myself from that point, in order to stay alive and sane. And for a while, it would have been a case of merely trying to get to a point where my life could be considered roughly comparable to where it had been before you had to go.
Now, maybe that’s not even possible. You and I were numbers people, after a fashion, wanting to quantify and compare things objectively. But life is filled with too many variables, most of which can’t be objectively measured. I may have a cleaner house, a lighter frame, a freer schedule, a list of plans for the future that I didn’t (and, in some cases, couldn’t) have when you were here; does that make my life objectively better? And what about other external forces and happenings, such as my facing (once again) the possibility of losing Dad, for instance (which will happen eventually, but not necessarily right now, despite a pretty nasty scare this past week). How do those factor into whether I have a better or worse life, and can I recover from those, either?
I honestly don’t know, honey. There are things I can point to and say I couldn’t have done this with you around, and it bothers me greatly to admit it, since I remain convinced that you were just about the best thing in my life. To say such things would be to deny the goodness you brought to my existence, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to believe there was something better that I only now could pursue.
And I’m telling you this because… well, because there never were supposed to be any secrets between us – and there still aren’t, I’d like to believe.
But also because… I couldn’t fit it on a postcard.
Letters to Rachel 