Dear you

Dear ________,

For the longest time, I thought that Carly Rae Jepsen talking about how she missed you so, so bad before she met you was incredibly, mind-bogglingly stupid. Then I started writing this letter. I've reached this sentence, and I get it now; it seems like the best way to express my feeling right now.

Because I do miss you, and we haven't even met yet.

I'm not sure how to introduce myself, or if I should introduce myself.

I discovered you what must've been four or five years ago, as a contributor to a blog I'll not link to here. I visited your blog fairly often back then, but it wasn't one of my regular visits. Eventually that blog withered away, and my attention wandered to other things - I honestly don't know where any more.

What prompts this was something, maybe ten days ago, that brought me back to that blog, and then to your blog. And there I discovered that, in the years since I'd last visited your blog, you'd had a child.

We have never met before; I have never spoken to you, nor you to me. We are two planets sharing nothing but a common universe, and like planets I'm not sure it's my right to intersect their orbits. You don't know I exist, and all I ever was to you was a voyeur. Not even an attentive voyeur at that; I wasn't in the past, and have no reason to think I've improved since then.

That's why I'm not sure if I should introduce myself: an introduction obliges me to say more, and we are happily different enough that I'm not sure I have any words that would be worth offering. That's why I am writing this on my blog with even less context than the little I have, rather than in an email to you. You've made it clear that you value your privacy.

And yet I need to say that what you wrote on that blog long ago? I remembered that, and read it, and was the better for reading that, I think. It mattered to me that you were, and that you wrote, even though it feels long enough ago that I'm no longer entirely certain how.

And even if I never find the courage or need to actually contact you, even if I never get in touch, even if our paths stay as separate as they have always been and perhaps ought to be - no ethics of presence will ever take away my need, or desire right now, to somehow say

Thank you.

-___________