The Dreamer ✓

Letter 17

NO.17; A LETTER TO YOUR BOYFRIEND, GIRLFRIEND OR SIGNIFICANT OTHER

MARCH 8th, 2014

Dear James,

Yes, I know you're not my boyfriend but a girl can dream right? To tell you the truth, I've never even had a boyfriend let alone a first kiss. Is that weird? I'm seventeen years old and you would think I would have had some romantic or sexual interaction with a boy.

Well, I haven't.

Actually, the closest I have ever gotten to anything remotely romantic is with you. Like that time in Year Twelve. It was in late May and we had a little more than a month of school left before the summer holidays and our first year of sixth form ended. Do you remember? We were sitting at the back of the school library, revising for our English Lit exam that was only four days away. We'd been meeting up every Wednesday afternoon to study together. It had been your idea, you'd suggested it a month before and I'd nodded casually and when you'd run off to catch the bus, I walked all the way home with the brightest smile on my face.

Do you remember, James? Our table were coated with textbooks and notebooks and scraps of highlighted paper. I was looking over my old essays and taking note of the suggestions Ms. Kiplin had made on how to improve and get higher a grade, when you spoke up.

"I'm going to fail," you said.

I looked over at you, you were sitting opposite me. You had this pained look on your face, it pulled your eyebrows together and pressed your mouth into a fine line. You had Macbeth in your hands, and you stared at it like you were ten seconds away from hacking it to pieces with an axe.

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

You continued staring at the book, "I can't do this. I don't know why I thought I could. Shit, I'm going to fail."

I recognised something in your tone, it sounded like despair, the cutting cold kind. If you let that sit inside you long enough, it bleeds into your bones, and eventually rips into your soul. You're too bright for that, James. I couldn't let that kind of misery consume you. I mean, you don't wanna end like me. I felt clawing panic for a moment as I tried to find the right words to drive away your despair. I almost wanted to crack a joke but I knew it wasn't the time for that.

"You know, there's a passage everyone thinks is by Nelson Mandela but it was actually written by Marianne Williamson, she's a spiritual activist and founder of the Peace Alliance," I said but you still weren't looking at me, your eyes were burning holes into the pages of Macbeth. "In one chapter of her book she says something interesting....she says, uh, she says....Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us."

And then you must have recognised something in my tone because you slowly looked up. Your green eyes found mine.

"I'm going to repeat something you've heard so many times that it must be ingrained in your system," I said and swallowed, the intensity of your gaze was a heavy pressure that made my heart drum hard. "Life is hard. You know that. Life is hard but...but that doesn't mean you're not. If life gets harder then so do you with each trial you face. These exams might seem tough, James, but you're tougher."

I said, "You're more capable than you think. Like, do you remember when we had our mock exams and you were convinced you were going to fail but you ended up getting one of the highest marks in sixth form? Failure is a powerful motivation to succeed but failing itself is not always a bad thing. In fact, it's from failure that we learn our most important lessons. So don't fear failure, you need it."