Love letter 4 reader

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My love,

Before we embark on this journey together, I want to ensure you're prepared. I hope you don't mind if I ask you a few questions. The story I need to share requires a tender heart, and I fear that if your heart is burdened, it may not bear the weight of it. So, let's start by checking in on your heart. Take a deep, slow breath and let it soften. Focus on how it feels as it fills your lungs and envelops your heart. Are there any sharp edges, any hardness? Can the next breath come in even more smoothly, or does it encounter resistance? If it does, perhaps it's best to return to this story at a different time. Just remember, the breath is like a river and can soften rough edges if you let it.

If you find that found your heart to be soft and warm, I trust you'll be able to carry mine with yours. Imagine this story as a delicate, raw-skinned creature, in need of gentle handling. But before I entrust it to you, there's one more thing I ask of you.

Close your eyes, but only after you've finished reading, unless you can hear my voice, in which case, feel free to continue listening. Once your cannot see with your outside eyes anymore, try to see with your inner eye. You are likely to have already begun and be seeing a number of images and words. Allow them to flow over you. Are you submerged in this sea of thoughts?

If so, then excellent.

Now, think of the last time you saw sunlight. Really think of it, its exact light. How did it look? Were you able to feel its warmth? If you see the light clearly in your mind, start to dull all sounds around it. Imagine the world fell into unnatural silence, allowing you to experience the light in its pure quiet essence.

Focus.

Could the light lift you out of the other images? Did it work? Or did the other images keep clouding in, obscuring the light? I know you’re quick enough to understand this metaphor. This story was written for you, and I know that you will see your own pain reflected within it, as I did when I wrote it. You must be able to escape that pain when it becomes too overwhelming or I will have cared poorly for you. I love you and hope you see what I saw in this story.

Safe dreams now, and I talk to you soon.

The story goes like this: there was no beginning, but there was heaven and earth. Earth was for bodies to sit and for leaves to grow, fall, and rot. Heaven was the origin and the destination, where all things came from and returned to. All creatures existed in bodies that moved, loved, and died but also in Heaven. Creatures tirelessly searched for Heaven throughout the embodied earth. Some found it, some made it, and others awaited its revelation. However, not all creatures were made equal; for as Heaven split into form it could grow and be moulded by how much love it received. Yet, there were windows to Heaven for those who needed them. Angels come to earth both messengers and messages of Heaven, Divine Machines.

Now, I am speaking to you in the language of Abrahamic religions, if you find it comfortable. This is an old story, it is the only story, yet it can be told many ways.

I can explain it the way human creatures explain things through shared words. It might go like this: when people undergo multiple interconnected traumatic experiences that cause enduring harm, they fracture their sense of self. It's a survival mechanism where survivors split their "bad" selves, those that suffered the trauma, from their "acceptable" selves. This strategy exacts an emotional toll, necessitating ongoing dissociation, denial, and self-loathing, ultimately leading to the abandonment of the vulnerable selves to survive an unsafe world (Fisher, 2017). Socially marginalised and fragmented by trauma, people seek alternative places reconnect their fragmented selves. The internet offers as such a refuge; a haven for managing identities that deviate from societal norms. Online communities offer support and enable traumatised people to affirm all their selves for the first time, providing solace to those culturally displaced. Membership in such communities allows one to challenge their marginalised status, manage inconvenient identities, and receive empathy without the fear of judgment from unsympathetic parties (Smith, 2013). As such, the digital realm exists both "out there" and "in here," a space that is simultaneously public and private, an extension of the self and the other. Confused and feeling isolated, people continuously turn to the internet for assistance. There, they discover a community that can acknowledge the fragments of their fractured selves, even if the mirror may reflect unsettling images. In community, the dispossessed find a reservoir of refuge to forge their own culture, albeit one still influenced by the physical world’s normative standards. Your relationships become the narratives you construct (Adler & Adler, 2008).

I could tell this story by asking you one question too. When was the first time you felt loved? To me, this is the most painful way to tell this story.

The simplest approach is the way of fairy tales, where there are good children and bad stepmothers. If I used that narrative form, the story would really be quite simple.

Once upon a time, all people were stars in the night sky. They shined together, forming one magnificent entity that expressed itself in thousands of ways. When they wished it so, they would come down to Earth and each inhabit a small body and experiencing a small life. Some of these lives were joyous ones, where the stars could feel a parent’s love, eat chocolate and swim in the ocean. Others were less fortunate, and lived lives full of people who had forgotten they too were once stars. They experienced a pain so strong that it shattered them into a million shards, all sitting neatly inside a human body. Fragmented stars went on living their human lives, did homework, laundry and had conversations; forgetting The Great Sky from which they came.  There were, however, windows to find glimpses of it. These windows were not what you may imagine; they were intricate machines made of cables and circuits. The machines helped them find others, both shattered and whole. The shards reflected onto each other and shone so much light back into the stars that some started slowly mending and rekindling their starlight.

Hello again. Have I lost you? Perhaps I have, I never knew you for one to read fairy tales. Trust me, you will find them relevant. I will tell you some traumas and they all have truly happened. I promise you now not to ever hide the truth or soften its impact, for facing it can be so liberating. All I can do to protect you is to prepare you. It is not crucial to find out who endured which type of suffering, but rather to know that suffering was endured. You may have encountered some of this yourself, or it might have manifested differently for you. I’m not sure, as you never shared that with me. Please, be as gentle with my pain as I will be with other’s and indulge a little of  my storytelling.

Love,

Yours.