The truth of the matter

I haven’t been completely honest with you. Yes, I started following you around online because I found you interesting, or whatever, but the reasons it intensified aren’t entirely how I’ve described them in my past letters.

You know I have my music career, but I also have all these side streams of revenue. I come from poverty so have always lived with a scarcity mentality. I can’t feel secure only depending on one source of income, I’ve diversified. I have dozens and dozens of ways to make a buck. A lot are passive income sources that don’t require too much attention from me. Others are more labor intensive and rely on the talents I’ve cultivated over the years. 

 

I started picking up a lot of work writing for other people, both musical and literary works. I’ve written some songs for artists that have made it all the way to the Top 10. I’ve also done work ghost writing for a fiction series or two that went onto to be hugely successful in more than one medium. When I landed the contract for one of these jobs I was in a panic. I had been isolating for a good few years. This narrative was heavily relationship based and I was out of practice, you know ~ relating, to say the least. I needed to do some serious research but was still not particularly keen on leaving the house.

 

When I tried to envision the female lead in this story you kept coming to mind.  I used the resources I already had in place and added a few more tricks to my bag, et voilà, let the research commence. I wasn’t wrong, you were perfect for the part. In the beginning I was able to keep a professional distance between my feelings for you and the roleplaying I had to do to understand the characters. I finished the book, and it was published almost exactly on our one-year anniversary. I’m sure if you read it, you would recognize bits of us in there, but I wrote it all when we were so new, it was just a whisper of us. I used our interactions as fodder for dialog, but the major plot points were just sensationalized garbage for the bored brains of the masses.

 

After the contract was up, work was done, check was cashed, I found myself still doing the research. At first, I didn’t think much of it. It’s always hard to say goodbye to a character you wrote in a book, they become real on so many levels. When you’re writing them you have to live, breath, eat them, just like a method actor would do for a big role. But as time moved on you kept sneaking into all my other work. 

 

Every writing prompt I’d start on somehow led back to you...

 

Write about a ship that can take you somewhere different from where you are now 

You were the ship, taking me away from everything I held fast to, terrified and exhilarated we sailed into the unknown. 

 

Eye Contact, Write about two people seeing each other for the first time 

I’d write about the first time I saw you in the café and my mouth went dry when we locked eyes. 

Choose an animal. Write about it 

I’d write about you in the body of a slinking cat, slipping into my room, up onto my bed, purring me to into a peaceful sleep. 

 

Everything I saw returned to you somehow. I couldn’t square it with how I saw myself. This was the birth of my hatred for you.