Monday, January 20, 2025

An Open Letter to Kenzie©

 

 


Kenzie, thank you for inviting me to your birthday celebration, yesterday.  The gift that you gave me was incredible!  I was so surprised!  You shouldn’t have!  It was too much!  I really wish that you hadn’t, the cost was too dear, the price was too high, but you paid it, and I can never, ever, begin to repay you, or pay it forward fully. 

 

It is a marvelous, wonderful gift, because for the first time in over forty years, I felt true emotions inside my soul, emotions other than anger and rage, which are my usual companions.  Oh sure, I have felt happiness and pain during all those long empty years, but they were fleeting, shallow, temporary, outside emotions; pale imitations only, not true emotions, which twist your heart and tear at your soul, or make you catch your breath in joy and wonder. 

 

You see Kenzie, to survive, I long ago learned to build walls, high and strong, and to bury myself within them, and to harden my skin into armor, because the world is such a hard place, it is not kind and has little time or patience for sensitive souls, who feel too much, and so I became numb, and felt nothing, or at the best, very little.

 

But you came and kicked in the doors, and you tore open the walls, and shredded my armor, and for the first time in decades, I felt sadness, loss, and pain.  Thank you, it felt truly awful, but I FELT!  I felt sorrow, I felt pain, and I cried for only the fifth time since I was ten.  It is such an amazing, incredible, and miraculous gift that you have given me; because I felt, I feel, I am not just numb!

 

A simple “thank you” is too little, too insignificant, in comparison to the all that you have given.  All I can do is promise you that I won’t rebuild the walls, or repair the doors, that I will stop hiding inside my shattered walls, that I won’t put on my armor, that I will keep on feeling, even when it hurts, that I won’t let myself become numb again.  So, thank you and you have my promise.

 

Oh, and thank you for the birthday cake, it was delicious!

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