It's been more than a year since my last letter in this blog. Admittedly, this isn't the first attempt on making some sort of a comeback. I tried writing several times before and often started with what happened in my life while I was gone, trying to fill in the gaps. But when writing, I would also think: who in the world cares? What's the significance of something quite trivial happening to me to some stranger on the internet? (especially right now with what's going on in the world).

Perhaps part of the reason why I stopped writing in this blog was because I found my words rather inconsequential compared to the more important and interesting books and essays out in the world. I mean, how do my words compare? Do my words even carry weight? Or am I just wasting time? 

Sorry if this may be coming across as a pity party — that's not it at all. My overthinking brain would operate like that, finding reasons and hidden motivations to my minutest of actions, always trying to understand why would I be doing something and for what. In this case, why would I keep writing here? 

In one of the books I read last year — The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera — this line jumped out at me: "culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity." I got a bit concerned that I might be contributing to this overproduction, to this disastrous avalanche. But with social media — a space where people are encouraged to post more and more content, whether it be necessary or not (because if you don't post about something, it may as well didn't happen, right?) — anyone can unwittingly be guilty of this madness.

After some time, I saw this blog for what it was — a graveyard of thoughts and words and images, much like the rest of the internet, if you really think about it. I had always been preoccupied with the thought of death — especially that of my own — and during the cursed year of 2020, death hung heavier in the air because of the global pandemic. 

If I were to die, what would my epitaph say?  

It dawned on me that the words I write here, the letters in this blog, could form part of said epitaph. It's another way of looking at our actions: the things we do, the things we make or create, every goodness we cause, every evil we inflict, will eventually become a memory that we leave behind for people to remember us by, and all will simply become our epitaphs when we die — the whole of our lives reduced into a few words over our graves.

But I'm still alive, doing my best, writing this, and so I don't want to dwell on this morbid imagery. Death and life are two sides of the same coin, aren't they? And I'd rather see this blog as some living, breathing thing as opposed to some graveyard, even though it is that, too. While I live, it also continues to live.

I'll see you again in the long run.

with love,

abelink

p.s. "writing letters addressed to the fire" from evermore by Taylor Swift ft. Bon Iver