A letter rewrote (so it’s now for everyone instead of someone specific)

Hi there,

I have lost count of how many times I have tried to write this. With the minimum knowledge of how to end it and a null set for the opening. I kept asking myself whether a letter would be too outdated or too weighty in all senses, but in the end, I thought it would be nothing more than a selfish act of sincerity. I don’t need a proper reason in the same way I don’t need a formal opening.

Getting to know you is a piece of very sudden luck. I was having an awful time waiting for application results with deprived sleep and constant allergic reactions. The more I valued my exertion, the more disappointment I received in the end. The truly brain-babbling part is that I can’t share my conditions with others. My friends were facing similar situations, and my teachers invested a lot in me. As for my family, they hate losing control. So, it’s my own emotional baggage. At that time, there were only two treatments: Russian lit and economics. Everything else is either too personally related or too impractical. And that was the time I got curious about a concept and left the arrogant math proof in your office. It was like I was thrown there to know you at the perfect right time. That’s a clichéd line, but everything is determined by probabilities, isn’t it?

Back to the main page, you were a truly inspiring figure, intelligent, kind, moonish, yet a little bit rebellious and very much stubborn. It comes to me who is stupid and young, that you have carried a lot, and thence, I started sharing conversations with you.

We humans often inevitably push ourselves into the trap of asking why are other people being kind or nasty to us, and strangely, the first usually causes more mental struggles than the latter. However, I think we have forgotten one essential thing about life: it is perceived; it is individualized. So no matter who we are, we can be a gift to someone else simply by carrying a different way of perceiving the world. Thus it should not be too hard to understand how precious it is to look at the world differently (= having a new world) on someone else’s shoulder.

You are the person who has inspired me to reexamine my own identity and my own belief. I have had many sleepless nights asking myself those vague questions. What’s the meaning of life? Who am I? Is there an end? And I have blocked them for a long time. Now, they have started attacking me again, simply because I have seen you as someone who is vastly different from me.

For me, human lives are all about chasing, which means we are living in the answers right now. Yet we keep asking ourselves the question about what life is as if we don’t have it. Life is a process, and it can only be a process with an existing terminal unrevealed. Imagine if we really get the chance to know what it is like after death and, whether there is something beyond human knowledge, how we will live. We live because we mask ourselves away from the answer so that we can keep trying to find something new to chase and to grow and to change for. When we don’t have the answer, we can cultivate new desires, new unfulfilled goals, and new mysteries to solve, so we can live with a purpose. But if we have already acquired the final answer, the process stops. When we can no longer chase for something new, the chase itself also ends.

That’s the “vulgar” part of living.

Just like what you said about Onegin, everyone has their own desires and weaknesses. That’s what makes humans human. Consequently, none can avoid judging others, but as long as they are aware that they are using their own judging criteria, there won’t be any severe harm. Humans tell lies. Disagreeing with this is lying to ourselves. True courage is knowing all our flaws but still loving ourselves, which requires the sharpest honesty. (For this reason, I often get annoyed by myself: the ability to stay conscious and the disability to obey what is real.)

We don’t indulge ourselves with the vulgarian.

Sorry for opening a grand topic and giving a naive interpretation. Here is the end of the letter. I am bad at transitioning.

Talking to you is always joyful. Although it didn’t appear like those conversations meant anything specifically, I have started healing myself from dwelling on the past. I deeply hope that the appreciation that I thought I must express can be delivered, if not in a way as cheesy as I am.

When you were standing under the populous, your eyes, glittered with light, nearly transparent, were so purely green, and that was a stunning picture of memory.

I sincerely hope life can treat you kindly.

Stay healthy, and smile more.

With the warmest wishes, always,

Haoxi