The Things You Would Have Said

Dear Beau,



We got lost somewhere along the way. You said “something happened to what we used to be” and yesterday I figured it out. You lost yourself. My shrink once told me “people change but their essence remains the same.” You were still that gorgeous guy that played guitar late at night, watched series with his dad and liked wine. What I’m trying to say is, you changed, you stopped trying to make us work.



And it’s okay. We’re young and I shouldn’t have expected so much out of you. You weren’t ready to be my person. You weren’t ready to tell your friends about me, travel together, introduce me to your family or talk about our future. It was a dead end relationship from the very start. But it was beautiful. So goddamn beautiful and fuck anyone who says otherwise.



We were two people in love. God, I still love you. I think a part of me always will. Right now, I am setting you free. I don’t hate you or resent you for not putting in as much as I did. I understand you weren’t ready.
I wish you the best. If you got back together with your ex, good for you, she’ll give you whatever I couldn’t.



Goodbye, this will be the last letter I write you. It will go in the box where I kept all of your unsent love letters. It will be hidden in my closet, far away from view, under a lock, with a thousand other memories I’m not strong enough to dust off.



Always,


Gabriella, age 17

Dear Hannah,

Ever since we were thirteen, and the ‘weirdest’ girls in the 'cool’ clique, I thought I knew we’d be friends for life. Having someone like you that understands everything and anything I say is a rarity at most. I loved everything about growing up with you, and for that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I don’t know if you think about this everyday, or not at all, but it’s sad not having someone like you in my life. 

After our first and last argument, in the summer before our twentieth birthdays, life is so different. All of my stories are stories about us, things that we did that no one else would get. My jokes are jokes that we have told and shared…no one else can laugh at the same things, or give me one glance and have us both burst into laughter. 

Having a best friend is something many people have, but the similarities in our humour and hearts are something that I have difficulty finding with anyone else. Our early morning bike rides, adventures with boys, nights out, sleepovers and parties we shared are things that are inevitably stored in my memory.

I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you were not as important as me, because to me, you were the most important person out there. I’m sorry if you felt overshadowed or that I didn’t respect your choice in boyfriend, which lead to the end of our friendship.

I sometimes wonder how you’re doing. I wonder whether it is worth trusting anybody, or getting to know anybody as a friend, because it can all be taken away from you in a ten-minute phone call. 

You are due all of the happiness that you deserve and from what I know of you, I love you.

From,
Jessica, age 20

Dear Mema, 

Even though I see you and can touch you and feel you with me, I still miss you. I miss the old you, the one who knew my name, the one who would take me to pick buttercups from the garden, the one who loved my dad and all of your other children. I will admit, I hate coming to visit you now. I can’t stand seeing you like that. Over the past four years, I’ve seen you slowly go downhill from the fun-loving, spoiling her grandkids, caring grandma that you always were when I was growing up, to the woman who can’t form sentences and doesn’t even recognize her own family. 

I know the anger and hatred is not really you speaking. I know the real you would never dream of speaking to anyone that way. I just have to remind myself that it’s not really you. I’m going to remember you the way you used to be, I promise. I will not let the way you act alter my feelings and love for you because I know it’s not you. 

I think it’s even harder for me to comprehend right now that I could tell you this to your face, but you wont understand a word I say, and you won’t know who I am. You see me growing up and came to graduation, and see me progressing on my life’s journey, though you see it you don’t know it. I would give anything for you to be your old self just for five minutes so I could tell you how much I love and miss you. There’s no way to let you know how much you have influenced me in my life. I just wish I would have known when I was younger that Alzheimer’s Disease would have taken the real you away from me; maybe I could have remembered the last day I spent with you while you were still in your right mind. 

I wish there were a way I could tell you I love you and you would understand. 

I love you and miss you and I am sorry that you can’t comprehend that anymore.

Your first Granddaughter,
Kristen, age 19

Dear Mom and Dad,

I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I haven’t and won’t live up to your expectations for me.
I’m sorry I’ve been so much added stress on your life.
I’m sorry you don’t like my friends.
I’m sorry you disagree with the decisions I’ve made.
I’m sorry I don’t follow all the rules.
I’m sorry I’m not what you wanted.
But I will never truly be sorry. Because I like who I am. 

I might not meet your expectations but I’m damn proud of who I am and what I’ve endured to get here.

The only reason I’m added stress is because you chose to think so low of me. You only take time to notice my flaws and mistakes. So maybe if you tried to pay attention to my success, you would realize I succeed more than I fail.

My friends, the ones you think are “bad influences”, are the reason I’m still breathing. Without them, I’d be fucking lost. If anything, you should be thanking them; they make living with you tolerable.

Look, I know I’ve fucked up in the past, but it’s my life and I control what happens. So stop trying to hold the pen: this is my story and only I can write it.

Rachel, age 16

My Dearest Wendy,

Wouldn’t it be great?
To live life as it once was?
Without worry. Without regret.
Without the troubles that cause us so much pain.
To live like Peter Pan
And the other Lost Boys.
To fly off
To the Neverland.
To forget the world as it is,
And live in the world of adventure.
We could’ve had that, you know.
But because of the fear we learned growing up, I doubt it’s even even possible now.

From your Lost Boy,
The Child Who Never Grew Up, age 18

Dear Mom,

Though there’s so much I wish we could talk about now, I can honestly say that there is nothing unsettled in my heart that I wish I had said before you passed away. Everything that is truly important and needed to be said was said. I told you every day before you passed away how much I loved you and how beautiful you were. Though we only had 21 years together, you taught me so much. 

That said, there’s so much I wish I could tell you now after your passing. There have been countless times that I have reached to pick up the phone and call you only to become frustrated that I know that you can’t answer where you are. So many things have happened, and I wish you were here just to talk about them. It’s the day-to-day things that I want to talk to you about the most, but I’ll just tell you the most important things I really wish you could know. 

I want you to know more than anything that I am still surviving. I still haven’t figured out how to live without you, but each day I wake up and try to make it through. It may not seem like much, but I think it’s what you would have wanted. In your absence, my heart is still broken, and I still cry often, but I also smile a lot when I think about all of the amazing times we had together. I also want you to know that you have left me well equipped to face the rest of life. You taught me the most important lessons in life in the short time we had together: love God, love people, be kind, give whatever you have to make some else’s life easier, and even when life rages against you, sing a song. I miss singing with you so much.

Finally, I want you to know how thankful I have become in the time since your passing. After you passed away, everyone was quick to tell me how sad I would be when I thought about you, but nobody told me how thankful I would be. I believe that I had the most amazing, beautiful, godly mother for 21 years, and when I let that thought sink in, I am overwhelmed with thankfulness for the time we had together. Though some people have their mother for 60 or 70 years, how can I be jealous when I believe that the 21 years we had together were better than 100 with anyone else? I think about all the lessons you taught me—how to love, how to be loved, how to sing, how to worship, how to endure, how to be happy—and my heart is again filled with thankfulness and happiness.

If you can read this where you are, the last thing I want to say to you in this letter is that I love you and miss you so much, and I’ll see you afterwhile.

Love always,
Elijah, age 22

Dear Erik, 

I still cannot believe that you’re gone. I like to think that you’re just somewhere on vacation and that you’re going to come back. It’s easier to deal with, being away at school and not being home all the time. Here, when I don’t run into you, it makes sense. I still cannot understand why you wanted to take your own life. I never would have guessed it in a million years. I never knew you felt that way. I do understand that you were a rare kind of person. You felt everyone else’ pain as your own, and maybe that’s what did it in the end. Maybe that’s why you couldn’t take it anymore, because we were all so weak and you couldn’t be strong for us anymore. All I know is nobody could ever replace you and nothing will erase those high school memories from our minds. We all miss you and love you. 

Love, 
Sammie, age 19 

Dear Lucy, 

Everybody told me then not to be upset, that you had the best of life, that keeping you dignity, wit and near perfect health until age 102 and fading away in just a few months was your best blessing.  Yes, I suppose they are right. But almost a year later I still miss you and that weird certainty that you were immortal and mine to keep forever.

Thank you for twelve years of pure friendship, the coffee in the mornings, and the scotch in the afternoons.

Thank you for sharing with me those amazing second-hand tales of the US Civil War that your grandfather told you – I wish I had had a tape recorder.

I wanted to tell you that I am now an American Citizen. You would have been so proud of me, had you gotten to know.

I hope that I can age with half the health, grace, class and friends that you had and I will forever miss you.

With all my love,

B, age 40