Dear Wanderer #37

Dear Wanderer,

While I'm mostly alone in Elsewhere, I can still hear the echoes of Mia saying that I was playing small, shying away from my potential. She's in the turn of every page of every notebook and is louder than the scratch of the pen. She was particularly fond of saying this about my first drafts. Maybe she was aware I had removed myself from my own stories. Maybe she knew there wasn't enough of a me to exist in them yet.

It wasn't that I was "playing small". After the crash, I felt like I was piecing my life back together, slowly and surely this time. It wasn't about putting the pieces back together as they had been before. I was happy that such an unfortunate situation had at least given me such an opportunity. But I couldn't hold the pen in the same way now. Too much had changed, either in the lasting impact from the crash or in how I was putting the pieces together. (Still not entirely sure which, but the clock moves forward.) I had to keep scaling former me's skillset back far enough till I got to the place where I could move forward as myself. Enough had changed from then to now that it only made sense to approach it like starting over. What Mia saw and what I needed were two different things. I don't think she was all that concerned with results, more focused on seeing signs of life somewhere in here. But small steps generally go unnoticed, don't they?

There's still an air of some looming deadline, "You should be healed by this time." An unrealistic deliverable because with each day something healed, another injury revealed itself. Figuring out if it was from the crash or from something else entirely became another task on an exhausting to do list. It took a lot of work to understand Mia's observations not as criticisms but truly observations that I was not myself. Or rather, I wasn't Mia's Strange anymore. In a way. So to speak. And since there wasn't anything (really) to replace it yet, the conversations could comfortably revolve around the death of Mia's Strange. Maybe that's an easier way for me to make sense of this: she wanted to talk about funeral arrangements, I was still processing that I had died.

(Figuratively, what's actually happening is a rebirth of sorts, it's not that grim over here.)

I don't resent Mia for it. She knew things had changed and as I was recovering, I was also getting further away from the Strange she remembered. After all, that me was the only reference she had for me being alive before the crash. But I can't pretend it wasn't like a time loop. No matter how far I progressed, Mia became the reset button.

"The funeral arrangements!"

"But I'm not dead."

"But you're not the you I remember."

"And I never will be again? Mia I was in crash and died. I'm trying to live again."

"But I need closure because I lost my friend."

Maybe the next line is that she won't find closure in my healing because my healing isn't about her closure. Maybe that's harsh, but it's true. Possibly, unbearably true.

Really this is about me writing again, not an imaginary conversation about a person who isn't dead and the friend mourning someone who didn't die. I think Mia wanted to see the potential she saw in me reflected in my work in a way that just wasn't possible at the time.

My attitude towards my work is that it was more important to create anything at all even if it wasn't "good". Complicated, convoluted ideas were much better than non existent ones. I learned more from writing the Hollow pieces than from trying to create something that would stand the test of time. Maybe they were only valuable lessons because they were so personal to me. Maybe Mia didn't resonate with it and that's all there was to it. Every work, I think, has something to serve the creator. A feature to it that might be overlooked by the audience or trivialized in the scrutiny. In my mind, it tends to look like a little anchor to a boat that I can't see and I just accept that it's there. It's doing what it needs to do, keeping that part of the creator grounded in a way that is real to the boat I cannot see and maybe don't need to see. As a metaphor I don't find it unsettling, but I can understand seeing an anchor chain just below the surface obviously connected to something but not seeing the something would be unsettling.

Like the topic of spirituality or the witchcraft business... because when I look at it that was my crown jewel of 11th hour desperation to live again. It was never about the aesthetic or the escapism. It was a kind of anchor (that I'm still finding the words for) that kept me attached to something. Witchcraft might not be the best word for this. It's saturated with connotations and stereotypes, but there's enough positivity associated with it that it will do for now. In the Hollow pieces, the attempts to talk about it in the most approachable way possible, the most useful way possible, I feel like I said nothing and maybe that's what Mia saw. It's a hollow place still waiting for something to arrive. Arrivals imply travel of some kind and I know that, even if I can't put it into words yet.

The reality is I may not be dead, but I haven't moved from the grave. Quite possibly, because I haven't accepted yet that there is a me that did die in the crash. Maybe it's not Mia's Strange who died, but mine. Maybe we do in fact need a funeral, to go over the will to see what this me will inherit.

Like a voice, for starters.

Strange