5/24/11

Dearest Stranger,

What's a mile in your shoes? I expect it's tiring. I hope, though, that it is also colorful. I hope that every inch of every mile shapes you, and every leaf passed by enters your mind's inner catacombs. Once you no longer see, once you no longer feel things, you begin to die. I don't want you to die, it would be horribly wasteful. If that slow death has already started to sink in, I implore you to kill it mercilessly, for even though death does not die, the implements of death are easily found and eliminated. Here, I write to you about just this one. I write about this one because unlike drunk drivers and unnamed diseases, you can control this. Just find the sources of apathy in your life, should there be any, and remove them. Know that the context of your life is not your life, and does not own you. Your existence in this world is independent of your job, family, school, friends and lovers. You are your own person, from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet is yours. It is all that truly is yours in this world. This may sound like a materialistic loss, but it is a gain as well. You don't have the burden of being more than the person you are. You assume roles of action and ownership at your own discretion, not because there is a natural law forcing you to. In this way you need not own sadness or any other burdens on your soul. Foul memories can be forgotten. Foul emotions can be replaced with ones you want. Foul habits can be unlearned. A foul life can be discarded and made fresh again.

Your life is in your hands, more than you realize, and less than it ought to be. Never let the world overwhelm you, don't succumb to the apathy this world engenders in its inhabitants, not for me, but for the proof that you are your only owner. In order to claim your life as the thing you own totally, live the world, and strive through it, but never let it become you, or you it. Once you are no longer yourself, and living true to that, you are dying.

5/16/11

Stranger,

You know, I have always been a writer. I think even as a sat through 7th grade math class years ago, willing myself to be the most Rational and Logical, I was still a writer. But who are you? I know only one thing about you. That you are Stranger. Stranger than any people I know, and Stranger than I am to myself for certain. You are Stranger than Mother or Father and you must be Stranger than at least one other of your type. But yet I am soon to be called Stranger by you, too. So I wonder, with childish fascination, which of us is left as Strangest?

Let me tell you a story.

There is a city far to the East named Izveraii. There is a woman there carrying baskets full of flowers. Roses, tulips, lilacs, and wild dandelions, stalks of field grass and grand sunflowers. It is a city of giving, where each person thrives by giving all they have to the person next to them. The woman gives her flowers to a man who heaves satchels full of compasses and he to a child who leads around a hundred fluffy rabbits, brown and white, and black and grey. But they give problems too. The man is given disease by boy and his rabbits, in return, and the woman's back becomes sore from the heavy bronze compasses she receives from and heavies for the man. Everyone is given a problem for their generosity in Izveraii, and the city of giving takes each soul at a time. The rabbits will eat the flowers someday, and the visitor to Isveraii watches and learns that it is only by sharing problems, not gifts, that people become close enough to escape it.

With love,
Your Stranger