Mat Dugard.

Dear Dugard,

I miss not knowing things.
Not the big, important things
just the small, strange gaps where anything could be true.
When questions didn’t demand answers, they just lingered. Grew and became stories.

I used to sit with uncertainty like it was a kind of magic.
Make things up. Believe them, just for a moment.

Let the world feel bigger because I didn’t understand it yet.
Now everything is immediate. Defined. Explained before it has the chance to feel mysterious.

But I think there was something beautiful in being wrong.
In not knowing, and not needing to.

Dear Dugard,

I don’t think I’ve lost the desire for a different life.
I think I’ve just grown tired of the distance between where I am and everything I’m told I should want.
It’s strange, carrying dreams that feel heavier than they used to.
Not because they changed
but because I did.
And maybe the hardest part isn’t letting go of them,
but admitting I don’t have the energy to keep pretending I’m on my way.

Dear Dugard,

Mentally, I'm still somewhere between glitter GIFs and lowercase confessions.
A place where feelings were typed in Arial and sincerity wasn't ironic yet. Where sadness was aesthetic and nobody pretended they were above it.

It was messy. Dramatic. Earnest.

But at least it felt like we meant it.

Dear Dugard,
I keep thinking about how fragile our connections really are. All these messages, feeds, notifications. They feel endless, but they’ll vanish the moment we do. There’s no signal waiting for us on the other side, no infinite scroll. Just silence, and whatever love we managed to carry in memory. Maybe that’s the point: to hold closer to what feels real before it disappears.

Dear Dugard,
They never gave us the full syllabus for being human. They taught us how to multiply fractions and recite capitals, but skipped the lessons on desire, on touch, on the way love can be both sacred and messy at once. So I went looking for answers in the dark, in bodies, in the fumbling language of skin. Maybe that’s why intimacy feels less like a skill and more like a dialect no one bothered to teach me. So I’m still conjugating love in the margins, hoping it will someday make sense.