A Letter

A letter to the boys in my life

Let me just be clear: this isn’t a letter to just anyone. This is a letter to my best friend and my boyfriend. This is a letter to my cousin. This is a letter to my brother. 

Dearest… you,

You’re so cherished. You’re so special. You’re precious to me. You might not know this and I might not show this but, oh my darling, I love you. I love you so much.

You are only eight years old. But believe me, when I tell you that there is so much darkness in this world, I hope you never get lost in it.

I want to protect you from it because if you see it, you will touch it. It will lure you closer and before you know it, it will engulf you. I don’t want it to engulf you. It will absorb you and it will leave you all alone. It’s so dark that you won’t be able to find anyone around you to help you out and what’s next? You will lose yourself in there, too. The light inside you will fade out and you won’t be yourself anymore. I don’t want you to ever look at the darkness when there is so much light inside you. I don’t want you to stop shining. I don’t want you to stop smiling and giggling and playing. I don’t want your childlikeness to ever diminish. I want to protect you from all of that.

I know you’re already thirteen but you’re still my baby brother. You’re my best friend and you’re my worst enemy. But you’re the epitome of my very existence. My love for you is as boundless as it is inexplicable.

I want to protect you the most. You’re only a child but I know you’ve got an old soul. You’re only a child but I know you know that there’s always more. You’re only a child but you’re growing up and one day, you won’t be a child anymore. You’ll be out in the real world all alone and I won’t be there to watch after you. You won’t be knowing what is happening around you, you’ll be exploring strange new things, getting lost in strange cities having meals with strange people and all I hope that you never get so lost that the only thing you find is this darkness. Because, my dear, it isn’t pure like you are. You’re so trusting and so gullible. You see only the good, only the beauty. You have no sense of evil. Oh, darling, you wouldn’t recognise evil if it was looking you right in the eye. So I don’t want it to ever find you. I don’t want it to destroy you. I don’t want it to harm or torment or traumatize you. I don’t want it to invade your heart and maraud your mind. I want to protect you from it. I just want to protect you.

You’re sixteen years old and you’ve danced with the darkness and you’ve played games with the evil. I wasn’t ever there to keep any of it away from you.

Darkness and evil, they know me very well. I’d rather they swallow me whole than ever even get a taste of you. You’ve got the most sincere heart. I don’t want you dancing with the darkness because what if one day it seduces you? I don’t want you to ever play games with evil again because what if one day you lose? I don’t want you to lose yourself to darkness and evil. I don’t want you to go away. I want you to stay here, to stay with me so that I can protect you.

You’re eighteen. You’re an adult. You think you’ve got it all sorted out and you think you know everything there is to know. You think that the only evil in the world is the crime that comes on the news and the reports that come in the daily paper. You try to protect me from that. But you don’t know how hard I try to protect you.

I try to protect you from the evil that resides inside people. The evil that you can’t see on television and in the papers. The evil that doesn’t come in the form of shootings and rapes. The evil that doesn’t come as tsunamis and typhoons. It isn’t just a nightmare that’s there one night and gone the next morning. It isn’t something that you move on from and forget about. This evil, it creeps into your mind like smoke diffusing into a sealed room. It slowly suffocates you until you can’t take it anymore and you give up. It consistently invades your heart and mind until it inhabits every cell in your body. You can’t leave it without leaving yourself behind with it. I don’t want you to leave yourself behind. I don’t want it to take you away from me. I want to chase away the evil before it comes within a hundred kilometres of you. I want it to never see you, never touch you. I want it to never destroy you or destruct you. I want you to let me protect you.

I want to protect you from what you do not know yet. I want to ensure that you never find out. My dear, I have walked through storms that are beyond your wildest imagination and I have danced with monsters worse than the ones under your bed. My dreams are of places that you see in your nightmares and my thoughts are darker than the sky on a cold winter night. I am telling you this so you know that whatever toxins the darkness tries to feed you and whatever poison the evil adds to your drinks, those are like candy and soda to me. I can take it. I can take it for you. I can keep you safe and I can keep your heart untainted and thoughts uncontaminated.

You are so pure and so pristine. I hope that you are never violated by the detrimental possibilities this universe holds. I hope you are never harmed or defiled by the pure wickedness that I have seen. I hope it never catches a glimpse of you and I hope you never catch any glimpses of it. I hope I can guard you and shelter you. I hope I can be your sword and shield if you ever face this war. I hope that you let me protect you. And I hope I can keep you safe.

Lots of love,