Dear Anya

Someone asked me if Anya was me. I said... No.

Dear Anya,

Please accept my apology. Before I really got to know you, I projected a part of myself onto you. I was a coward. Maybe I am a coward, and always will be. Maybe all artists are somewhat cowardly, feeling the need to take shelter behind a form they call art. Maybe that is why art exists, for those who are aware that their lives can never become as beautiful and meaningful as they wish, and decided to spend their meaningless time making art.

I needed someone's help to speak to the world. It doesn't need to go everywhere, to everyone in this "whole" world. By "world," I simply meant anything outside my body. But that doesn't make you less important. Instead, I loved you more than I love myself. I wanted you to become a piece of art, a girl people would appreciate, resonate with, and be willing to pause their steps for; someone I thought I should've become but couldn't. Everything I've been too afraid to ask for, I wanted you to have. I saw only the good in you and wanted to hide the dark sides you might have from others. I wanted to "protect" you, but I didn't realize I was neglecting you, rejecting you, and maybe even hurting you, just like your family did.

As I said, you carried my voice. Even though I claimed it was your grandma's story, you talked too much as a ghost. Of course. You are dead. But I was reluctant to silence you. When the three of them fight over and over again about the way to rest you in peace, I realized that they weren't fighting about you. They were fighting about something else. There were wounds that your family had buried so deeply, only to be blasted open by a bomb as devastating and magnificent as your death.

Even though I said it was a story about those who live, about letting go, I became the one who

couldn't let go when you started to fade from the story.

It still makes me sad that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make it your story. But the feeling of being an observer in someone else's story is familiar to both of us, isn't it?

Whether in the seventeen years you had, or in this two-hour movie, you could never quite become the protagonist. Maybe that's what makes you real. Maybe that's what makes the story real. You and your family became too real, and they took over my pen and started to write the story themselves. I felt powerless as the writer, but I didn't have a choice. Because I was never the narrator of your story.

Dear Anya, sometimes I wonder if we would have shared even more in common if you had lived to my age. I was lucky. My life has been loading tiny weights, one at a time, right at the moment when I was able to carry just a little more. I can't imagine how I would have survived if the same thing had given to me when I was your age. So please remember, It was not your fault.

Maybe they were right. You have something in me, and I have something in you. But you are not a part of me, or a shadow of me. I want you to know that, as I'm writing to you now, you are you, and will always be you.

And I am me, and will always be me.

W.