These things may happen to you

Dear [redacted],

I’m writing this letter from both the future and the past. These things I’m writing are not warnings per se, nor are they revisions of history. They are, in fact, a singularity; a chronicle of things that have happened and, most importantly, what could happen as has been and continues to be my experience.

First, let’s get one thing clear–I was and am a boy. I’ve always felt things strongly. So strongly, in fact, that the world taught me how to bury every shiver, every tear, every wail, every heartache, everything I can, have and will feel, down down down into a spot. It’s in between, that spot; a hyper compressed space of all of the emotions a boy can ever feel in the space between my heart and my ribcage. It is a black hole that turns all feeling into an ever collapsing, devouring phenomena that defies space, time, and even description. Anger, pain, joy, happiness all turned inward. It’s where souls go to die. You may have learned this already. I learned it as a little boy. You may or may not be a boy too, not that it matters. I’ve always been the type to cry very easily, but when this happens, you learn to anticipate the question, “are you a baby?” I learned the humiliation of outward emotion and over time, learned to bury the corpse of my feelings as a way to hide them. But I’m a gulf coast boy who knows that both the swamp and the sea can sometimes return the dead and so it goes with my feelings, floating to the surface of the murky, fetid waters where I’ve tried to bury them. These bodies are not undead like the zombies in the movies my high school friends and I used to watch. No, these are just bloated monuments to the moments when I had the audacity to feel human.

I don’t know where you are, chronologically speaking, but if there is something resembling a society where you live, I’m certain bad things happen where you are. They have happened here and I feel as if they are getting progressively worse. I used to believe in the social contract, thinking that we had a duty to help and protect the vulnerable because it was the right and decent thing to do. As I was and am a gulf boy, I was also a Reagan baby and I’ve seen how the rot of individualism and capitalism has perverted our idea of how society should be shaped. We point all of our efforts, all of our waking life, to a system that constantly exploits us and not only do we not fight back, we delude ourselves into thinking that someday we will be the exception that ends up at the top of the heap, our labor finally rewarded commensurately. Never mind the discarded bodies, many of whom are black and brown–that’s collateral damage in the war on…terror? Drugs? Poverty? Crime? I’ve lost track of which abstract concept we’ve declared war on lately. It’s hard to maintain any optimism when things are like this, though funny enough I don’t necessarily consider myself a pessimist. Maybe I’m delusional. I don’t think I am though and I truly hope you’re not. Not a pessimist, nor an optimist; hopeful. No matter what, I hope, because I see good things happen. I still see people do wonderful things. People still help others. Build for the future. Fall in love. We do these things because it’s endemic to the human experience. [Side note: the word “endemic” is particularly loaded right now. Long story for another letter, perhaps.] I hope that you still hope because hope keeps the black hole from fully collapsing. It devours of course, but at the same time the universe is expanding and that vast expanse still outpaces the black holes. At least I hope so.

Wherever you are, find yourself a telescope. Wait for the night. Go somewhere remote. Quiet. Watch the sky through that lens. I had a white telescope when I was about nine years old. It was white with black lettering on the side and I was always fascinated with just how clearly I could see the craters of the moon. I used to imagine myself as some sort of alien creature that could fly through space, still human but capable of traversing the stars by myself. My first stop would be the moon, then Jupiter, then Saturn. I’d move through the cosmos, of course, but I’d send back reports of my travails; the beautiful solitude I felt as I lay in the Sea of Tranquility. The feeling of falling past the searingly hot upper atmosphere, then through into the unfathomably cold winds of the Great Red Spot. Maybe you’re one of those aliens I’ve imagined myself as. Maybe you’ve seen Saturn’s rings first hand (I’m so jealous). Maybe you’ve seen a supernova first hand. Maybe, just maybe, you’ve even seen the Pillars of Creation up close. I hope you have, or will.

There’s a lot more that could be said about me and what things are like at my fixed point in time, but I’ll wait on your response. As I’ve never written to you before, I don’t want to impose a conversation on you that you have no interest in. Therefore, I’ll await your response. Tell me what your life is like. What things are happening in your world and time? What’s important to you and, most of all, what do you hope for?

I hope to hear from you soon.

My best to you and yours,

E. Reynoso, Jr.