11a.

Read this first

Dad,

Thank you for taking the risk to give me your letter for mum.

Second

I’m sitting at the library as I write this, the café area where you... and where when you walk past the library you see people and you wonder how they can look so useful whilst you're there walking or licking gelato or merely existing. The people next to me are laughing. They are slicing an apple in half using the plate that their coffees came on as a cutting board. One of them drops the knife as a furious honk sounds. Through the floor to ceiling glass in front of my desk I see a very small driver who has stopped behind some cars. The base of their palm is burrowing into the steering wheel. Looking at the cars in front of them, the ones they are honking at: there’s no one in them. The apple people, now pointing at the parked cars, resume their laughter as they eat a little bit of cyanide from their respective halves of the apple. I can’t remember the last time I pressed a horn.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote you a letter. Maybe a birthday card? This is not really a guarantee that I will send you this letter, only that I will write it.

Do you remember when we were at the beach the winter (such a typical mum ‘holiday-ing in the off-season is less expensive’ operation) of my last year of school? By the time I'd completed a practice exam, brother, sister, and mum had left for the beach and you asked me if I wanted to play a game of chess with you for money. I kept looking towards the beach. I didn’t want to go into the freezing cold water. But that's not what I said. You asked me questions about the music I was playing whilst studying, and whether or not I’d been to the various artist’s shows, and I said I was going to the beach. I wonder now if you were feeling upset about something that mum had said that day. There was some discontinuity in the way that you looked when you asked me if I wanted to stay. You always look me in the eyes, but this time your eyes were moving when you were talking to me. You were also looking towards the beach. But memory is malleable, and maybe I’m reading into moments details that weren’t there. When I didn’t say that some part of me wanted to stay, I was lying.

I also lied to you when I said that I had sent your movie recommendation list to my friend who brought ramen.

You probably would say that both those things are not a big deal, despite how you couldn't comprehend why my friend would like ramen but not like the list. And it’s true, these things aren’t a big deal. But these episodes feel emblematic of a bigger lie that I have built my life upon: to distance myself from who you are as a person. I’m sorry that I’m always emphasising the parts of you that are most unlike me. To my friends especially, and even more so sister, and even more so to mum, and lastly, you.

Concealing the parts of myself that are most like you, seems almost cosmically ironic, in the sense that this very behaviour seems so… like you, and maybe this is how children are destined to be.

I wonder if the reason you trust me is that you probably know me better than I know you?

And yet…
I know that we both have a complicated relationship with the beach, with the water.
I know that we want to communicate with people on our own terms.
I know that we cry more than we would ever allow others to perceive.
I know that we find it easier to say things when they are not said at all. All your loudness falls away in front of an angry human being and all my thoughts in front of a confident one.
I know that we’re both afraid to own up to our failings.

I’m sorry for the ways I've made you feel lonely for being yourself. I hope that one day I appreciate the things about you that are unlike me.

Unfold this after reading the first two

I appreciate the trust that giving me the letter from mum represents.

Open this last

But inside this envelope: these are your words to deliver.