A Letter, Found After

Before you read: put on "Fourth of July" by Sufjan Stevens (the audio attached). Let it play while you go through this. I think they go great together 🖤___________‎a letter, found after‎written for whenever you need it‎___________ ‎My love,‎By the time you read this, you will have already cried more than I ever wanted you to. You will have sat in rooms that feel wrong without me in them, and driven past places and had to look away. Reached for your phone more than once to call me. I know. I know all of that is coming for you, and I am so sorry I cannot be there to hold you through it. That is the only part of this I could not make peace with — leaving you to carry it alone.‎But I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it not as a goodbye, because this is not that. This is the opposite. This is me grabbing you by the shoulders, the way I used to when you were small and spinning out, and saying: look at me. Are you looking? Good.‎You are going to be okay. Maybe not right away. Maybe not for a while. But you are going to be okay, and I mean it the way I have always meant the things I said to you.‎I need you to live your life.‎I need you to understand what I mean by that, because this isn't like what people put on greeting cards. I don't mean seize the day and all that noise. I mean the everyday, ordinary, irreplaceable things. Treat yourself to something expensive on a random day for no reason. Let yourself be silly. Fall in love badly and survive it, because surviving it is its own kind of gift. Call your friends at inconvenient hours. Sit outside when it's almost too cold. Let a song make you cry in the car and then drive on anyway.‎I spent so much of my life thinking the big moments were what counted. The occasions, the milestones, the things worth photographing. But when I look back now, what I have is light through a kitchen window. What I have is you, small enough to fit in the crook of my arm, sleeping with your mouth open. What I have is all the ordinary weekends, all the nothing-afternoons, all the times we were simply together in a room, not doing anything worth remembering, and yet I remember every single one.‎That is what life is made of. That is what I am made of.‎‎Here is my confession, one I hope had been obvious. I have loved being your mother more than anything else I have ever been. More than any version of myself I had before you. I was not always good at it. I was not always present, or soft, or wise. But I was always there, and I was always trying, and every single day of it — even the hard ones, especially the hard ones — I would have chosen again.‎I would choose it now. With everything I know, with everything it cost me and everything it gave me — I would walk back into that first room, that first impossible love, without hesitation. ‎And that is what I want for you. Not my life — yours. Your unfiltered, unscripted, unphotographed life, with all its wrong turns and wasted years and late starts. All the things that will feel like failures and turn out to be the story. I want you to want it, even when it is hard. Especially then.‎Grief will try to convince you that joy is a betrayal. That laughing too soon is wrong, that being happy again is somehow you forgetting. Don't believe it. Joy is not forgetting. Loving your life is not a betrayal of the people who loved you. It is, in fact, the only real tribute. It is the only thing I ever actually wanted from you.‎Live so loudly and so fully that I can feel it, wherever I am. That is how you honour me. That is the whole job now.‎There will be good days, and they will feel guilty at first, and then less so, and then they will just be good days. Let them. There will be someone who makes you laugh until you can't breathe, and there will be places you haven't been yet that will feel like coming home, and there will be a version of yourself on the other side of this grief who is softer and stranger and more honest than you have ever been. I am looking forward to meeting them. I think they will be extraordinary.‎I think you are extraordinary. I should have said it more. I'm saying it now.‎You came from me. You were the best thing I ever made, and that's not because you turned out the way I planned. You didn't. You turned out better, you turned out like yourself, and that is more than I could have hoped for. Loving you taught me everything I know about what it means to be alive. You were my lesson in that. You were my proof.‎So go. Go and live your life. Let it be hard sometimes and beautiful sometimes and sometimes both at once. Stay at the party a little too late. Make mistakes. Tell people you love them before you have enough reason to. Be the one who stays.‎I loved every single year of you, even the ones you thought you were hard to love. ‎Now go make more of them.‎I'll find you in them. ‎All my love, every bit of it, always,Mum

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