The Last Letter (Revised)

When I was 16, scriptwriter Ricky Lee asked us during one of our workshop sessions: don’t you ever feel invisible? It happens to me so often. I merge into the crowd, my face becomes indistinguishable from everyone else’s. I disappear.

Nearly ten years later, my answer is still the same: I do. Going through adolescence and the first half of my quarter life has not done anything to break that glass wall. I still feel like people are seeing through me, that they’ll see through all the layers of fat, muscle and bone, and find out that I do not really exist, that I am someone else’s concept, God’s idea of a bad joke. I am not who I am, rather I am who other people wish me to be.

So, in my futile attempt at self-definition, I write. And ironically, in the act of writing, I inevitably disappear. The sharp edges of my Self dissolve, to give way to other shapes, other forms. I enter water, and emerge a mermaid, a starfish, or Athena herself, split from Zeus’ head, foam still churning at my feet. I am physically large, a monumental woman, but I feel invisible because of what I do. I’m a glass vessel, I contain separate universes, stars explode inside of me, so that sometimes I feel like I’ve lost my humanity, my ability to experience things as viscerally as most people do. Everything is art. I hear a horrible story, of a lola killed by the gardener who turned out to be her young lover, and think, hey, that could make for a good narrative. I was once accused of entering into doomed relationships just so I’d have something new to write about all the time. I don’t think we know how to love, Drew had said, we act the part, and we act it well, but when the house lights go down, without an audience, we’re at a loss for what to do next.

But no more. Never again. I’ve lost my script, the seats are empty, and all the rest of the cast members have gone home. I want to stop acting out my life. I want, finally and forever, to live.

Till then, I shall leave you, but not before I fill your begging bowl with tears. Then, perhaps, there will be room for transcendance.