A letter to Virginia Woolf (4th letter of the series of letters)
Dear Virginia,
I don’t know how to tell you all that I have in my mind, only for you. where do I even begin? I mean I can start with you living with such a terrible mental illness, and how you lost your family. I can never imagine the intensity of the pain you must have felt. You went through a lot Virginia, you had innumerable mental breakdowns. But you got up on your feet every single time. I have seen pain too, So I understand, I do. We have seen death up too closely, no one can ever be the same after that. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, you know. But I would rather talk about how you boldly used words. You made them yours, no one else could create the magic you made with your pen and ink despite breaking apart like a habit. I mean you made your suicide note sound like an artistic piece of literature, who could ever and why would ever? But through the time you lived, you wrote ferociously. You rose again and again with the light you carried inside of you over the incapacitating darkness there was. Did I mention this before? that I don’t know if I could ever be that brave, anyway, it isn’t a competition. and I could never make words flow the way you did. You made those words sing and dance under the moonlit sky, no one ever could or would. I guess all I am trying to say is, you saw the world differently and you left the world way before your time, depriving everyone of your patent rhymes. You didn’t end your pain Virginia, you just passed it on to your husband and everyone who ever loved you, you just left without a trace and drowned like it was okay.
With love,
Anushtha XO