A Letter to Tabitha...

Yesterday, taking a shortcut home, down one of those dark damp allyways of seattle, I discovered a letter sitting next to an old rusted out dumpster. It was mangled, water damaged and barely legible. Normally I would not pick such a thing up, but it had clearly been labored over, and I could not repel my voyeuristic tendencies (can you?). This is what it said...

My dearest Tabitha

I was sitting here with this cigarette in my hand, watching the smoke make strange hypnotic swirling zig zags in the air and it came to me. A pair of quotes, which I had committed to memory earlier this very morning, the latter of which was the motivation for the manuscript you are now reading. I had come across a book in which the beginning of each chapter was marked by a relevant quote to the events of the story, after reading two chapters I came to the conclusion that the quotes were more meaningful than the book itself, and I spent the next hour skipping from chapter to chapter trying to unravel the psyche of various men and women with the help of only a few words. It was Benjamin Franklin who initially caught my attention with the quote “It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.” As I sit here trying to count the times that I promised myself I’d quit smoking, these words ring loud and clear. What you are reading now is something I’ve been debating long and hard about doing. Oscar Wilde wrote that “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” And so it began.

Although I have sworn to silence certain events must come out, not only to relieve my own conscience, but also to finally tell the world the truth about what occurred when I was 16 years old, and how that would haunt me forever. Let it be known that these events were recently (for the most part) resolved, but only at great cost to the family (and the larger organization in question). The people involved will of course deny all of this, but the facts and evidence I have are far greater than anything they can offer, as they are my memories. The depictions of these events will also require a great understanding by you my dear Tabitha, as one can only***large chunk of unreadable text***. For you must understand that although these people have in the past decade turned for the better, and the large majority are truly good and decent, there are those that have sought to sweep all of this neatly under the rug.

Perhaps its an alternative hope of mine that with the included manuscript, if ***large chunk of unreadable text***

At this point the letter ended in the middle of a page with a jagged pencil line trailing off the edge of the paper. What I found was most likely a discarded attempt at finding the perfect words, ending in bitter frustration...though in my perfect fictional world I will go on believing that the author was violently murdered before he could render the final words. His already dead hands dragging the pen down the slope of the page.

Either way, I was left only with questions and my mind playing delicious little tricks on me.

I once had a teacher who told me I should rip the last 10 pages out of every book I read and burn them unread. He said “ this will ensure that every story you take in is unforgettable.” At the time I thought he was a loon. A fruitcake stirring his crock of shit.

But now I’m not so sure.