Mat Dugard.

Dear Dugard,

I miss not knowing things.
Not the big, important things
just the small, strange gaps where anything could be true.
When questions didn’t demand answers, they just lingered. Grew and became stories.

I used to sit with uncertainty like it was a kind of magic.
Make things up. Believe them, just for a moment.

Let the world feel bigger because I didn’t understand it yet.
Now everything is immediate. Defined. Explained before it has the chance to feel mysterious.

But I think there was something beautiful in being wrong.
In not knowing, and not needing to.

Dear Dugard,

When did drinking water become a daily goal? It’s strange,
how something meant to help can start to feel like something you can fail.

Dear Dugard,

I don’t think I’ve lost the desire for a different life.
I think I’ve just grown tired of the distance between where I am and everything I’m told I should want.
It’s strange, carrying dreams that feel heavier than they used to.
Not because they changed
but because I did.
And maybe the hardest part isn’t letting go of them,
but admitting I don’t have the energy to keep pretending I’m on my way.

Dear Dugard,

I keep thinking there will be more time. Later, after this, once things settle into something easier to understand.

But moments don’t really announce themselves like that.
They stretch quietly while you’re inside them, then collapse the second you try to hold on.

It’s strange how something can feel endless while it’s happening,
and impossibly brief the moment it’s gone.

I wonder how much of life is just that
misjudging the distance between staying and leaving,
thinking we have longer than we do,
until suddenly we don’t.

Dear Dugard,

I think sometimes we don’t want answers.
We just want to feel heard by something bigger than the room.

Even if it never calls back.

Dear Dugard,

Mentally, I'm still somewhere between glitter GIFs and lowercase confessions.
A place where feelings were typed in Arial and sincerity wasn't ironic yet. Where sadness was aesthetic and nobody pretended they were above it.

It was messy. Dramatic. Earnest.

But at least it felt like we meant it.

Dear Dugard,

I admire the way they meme their sadness, as casually as discussing the weather.

Dear Dugard,

It’s been a little while.

I’ve felt restrained lately. Not by fear exactly, but by possibility. Creative freedom is supposed to feel like flight, but it also carries weight. Every open door quietly asks to be chosen, and suddenly standing still feels safer than stepping wrong.

Everything looks promising. Everything feels worth trying. And so I don’t move at all.

My ideas stretch out like horizons; wide, glowing, endless. But they don’t point anywhere. There’s no edge to walk toward, no clear place to stop.

I begin things easily. Ending them is harder.

I wonder if direction isn’t something you find,
but something you choose and whether choosing one thing means learning to let the others stay unfinished.

Perhaps regret isn’t about what we never did,
but about learning to live alongside the ideas we never finished.

Dear Dugard,
Somewhere along the way, silence became easier to send than to share. I sit across from people I love and talk to them through glass. It's safer that way, pixels don't flinch, screens don't mishear. We call it connection, but it feels more like hiding in plain sight. Maybe that's what the future is. Everyone together, alone, typing.

Dear Dugard,
I keep thinking about how fragile our connections really are. All these messages, feeds, notifications. They feel endless, but they’ll vanish the moment we do. There’s no signal waiting for us on the other side, no infinite scroll. Just silence, and whatever love we managed to carry in memory. Maybe that’s the point: to hold closer to what feels real before it disappears.

Dear Dugard,
I miss when things took time. When waiting meant something. The long static between songs on a mixtape, the tremor of handwriting on paper, the ache that came from not knowing instantly. Everything hurts differently now, digitally, softly, in pixels and pings. I scroll to feel something, but it's frictionless. No Texture, no pause, no proof that I was ever really here. Maybe that's what I miss most: the slowness that made feeling feel real...

Dear Dugard,
They never gave us the full syllabus for being human. They taught us how to multiply fractions and recite capitals, but skipped the lessons on desire, on touch, on the way love can be both sacred and messy at once. So I went looking for answers in the dark, in bodies, in the fumbling language of skin. Maybe that’s why intimacy feels less like a skill and more like a dialect no one bothered to teach me. So I’m still conjugating love in the margins, hoping it will someday make sense.