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letters never sent
"they were waiting for nothing, they had all they wanted. it must be rather grim to hope for nothing except that life would continue indefinately the way it had started." -the reprieve jean-paul sartre a few days ago i wrote a letter to a girl i liked sophomore year in high school. she was in my geometry class. i never talked to her, except once, and i asked her to a dance. looking back on it, i realize i should probably thank her for declining my offer. after all, what would i have said to her for an entire night? i wouldn't have had much to say or do at all. i wasn't thinking about the consequences of my actions, obviously, at the time. i was swept up in some sort of pathetic attempt at pseudopassion. she was a quiet girl, i thought. it seemed that she knew no one else in the class. perhaps i presumed we could share our aloneness. but, i never got a chance to say how i really felt, if i felt anything discernible at all. not that it mattered. i realized while reading the letter i had written that i had no more to say to this girl than i had four years prior, which wasn't much. amidst everything else i said, including numerous questions and self-depreciating statements, there was a rather lame excuse as to why i had bothered to ask her to the dance. in it, i had taken out every possible emotion, and condensced it to basically "i wanted to see if you were as interesting to me as you seem to be." i couldn't even express to her that i found her attractive or that i based my "liking" of her on a general stereotype. she wore simple clothes, was pale, shoulder length dark blonde hair, deep brooding eyes. i thought she must be industrial/electronic whatever else i considered myself to be into at the moment. i could have been wrong or right, i'll never know. the letter i wrote to her is not mailed, it's just sitting in a drawer in my room at home. after reading what i wrote, i was embarassed at it's pathetic, self-serving language of trying to not sound naive and afraid, which is what i essentially am. i realized i must come across as a big intellectual show off phony to some people, ones who don't really know me, and even those who do know me. i'm not, but i can recall having conversations involving big words and ideals where i must have come across as some pompous jerk. i can't figure out who or what i am, and until then i don't want to problaim my emotions to myself or anyone else. |