Dearly Beloved

“Thinking of you, wherever you are.
We pray for our sorrows to end, and hope that our hearts will blend.
Now I will step forward to realize this wish.
And who knows:
starting a new journey may not be so hard,
or maybe it has already begun.
There are many worlds, but they share the same sky—
on sky, one destiny.”

It’s days like today that I remember this letter from Kingdom Hearts. A letter that a girl wrote to a boy she couldn’t remember. But that journey started through that simple act of writing the letter. And even though I’ve read this letter a million different times because I love that game, I get this feeling of serendipity every time I read it. When I sit down to write and spend anywhere from an hour to three hours doing so, I sometimes come up with just a few pages. Ya know, not a whole lot by any means. And I always just say to myself, “Damn, this is hard” but when I look back on what I’ve written it just seems so natural, like it mustn’t have taken hardly any time.

That’s the best way that I can describe what it feels like to write this novel. Years ago, when it was still a fledgling idea, I couldn’t have imagined it would’ve gone this far, but now I can’t imagine it any other way. It was probably hard at the time, and it really feels hard when I’m actually writing, but it’s so natural after that. It just feels like I’m connecting to the characters whose lives have already been lived and asking them to tell their story. As simple as that. I feel that I am just the conduit through which their lives are told. Which is kinda heavy once I really think about it.

But more than that, I think of this letter as something a past version of myself wouldn’t written to me. The me who originally had this idea is not this me. And in that respect, it feels like I owe it to him to tell this story. I’ve never had that motivation or that determination to push forward like I do now. I’ve always said that I’ll finish it eventually but now I’m actually doing it. It was hard getting to this point, and looking back, I’m glad that all of those things happened, good and bad. I don’t feel like I absolutely have to write this thing just to get somewhere in life or say that I’ve done it. I feel like I have to finish this because I owe it to myself. To continue feeling this good and hopefully feel even better.