𝑪𝒉𝒆𝒓

Liebestraum

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Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot.

Delusion might give you comfort in the moment, but it creates a growing gap between you and reality and you're the one who has to live inside that gap. Over time, keeping the illusion alive demands more and more energy. Eventually you start losing touch with your actual life, and something inside you begins to feel hollow.

The philosopher Sartre had a similar intuition. He called this kind of self-deception "bad faith" and thought it was one of the more corrosive things a person could do to themselves, because it's a betrayal of your own freedom and clarity.

That said, I think there's a nuance worth sitting with, not all softening of reality is the same. There's a difference between delusion (believing something false because it's easier) and hope or meaning making (holding uncertainty in a way that keeps you functional and open). The first closes you off, the second keeps you alive and moving.

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may i ask what made you start writing so many letters, and who are they really for?

blame kafka's letters to milena for this. something about the way he wrote just made me want to do the same. i've written way more than what's here, most just stay in my notes. and who they're for, some are for someone i love, some are for ppl from the past. some are just mine to keep.

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What is your favourite thing to discuss/ analyse? U can ignore if this feels too deep I just like picking apart ppls heads :3

honestly, i don't really have one specific favorite thing to discuss, but from what i've been writing lately, i like exploring love, heartbreak, and all the complicated, contradicted emotions that come with it. but i'm pretty much open to talking about anything tho. even if i'm not super familiar with the topic, i still love listening to other people's perspectives bcs they often help me see things differently.

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Lettera X. A Gentle Reminder for Myself.

The moment you realize how much disrespect you tolerated in the name of love. Bending boundaries, excusing wounds, repainting red flags as misunderstandings, all because losing them scared you more than losing yourself. What you called patience and devotion was actually self-abandonment. Every swallowed boundary keeps score and eventually, the bill comes due.

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I don’t know what you’re going through, but I just wanted to say I really admire how you turn pain into something so poetic. How are you holding up these days? I’m here if you ever want to talk (or even if you just want to keep writing, I’ll still read them happily)

thank you, that really means a lot! i'm doing okay, just taking it day by day. and how do i talk to you though if i don't know who you are? 😂

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Lettera IX. When home no longer feels like home, where do you flee?

It's not about having four walls or a roof to block out the sun and rain. Home has always been the place where I could return broken and still be accepted. Where I would be seen, heard, and desired by someone. Where my weary bones might at last rest without feeling guilty.

I had that once.

Now every step toward it feels like walking into colder air. The rooms are getting to know me less and less. The warmth has thinned and is now passing through my fingers like smoke. Someone once told me, "Come to me when you need anything." So I came. He wasn't there. Maybe because what I needed wasn't anything. It was him. For the sound of his breathing, for the space between his arms. And I guess that wasn't part of the offer.

I'm no stranger to loneliness. Old lover that it is. I thought I'd left it behind for good, but here it is once more, sitting beside me as if it had always intended to come back. I can vividly picture its weight and how it simultaneously makes the space seem larger and smaller. So if I can't run to him, rely on him, or find that feeling I keep looking for, what then? I guess I'm still figuring out where to go. I remain standing at the door of what I believed to be my home, contemplating whether to knock once more or simply turn around and leave. But that's alright. Not all questions require an answer right now. For now, I'm just waiting—a little lost, a little worn out, and very much alone.

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Lettera VIII. Am I writing to forget or to remember?

That is the question I read on the internet at 3 AM, the same one I've asked myself and led me to the conclusion that writing isn't really about choosing to forget or to remember. It does something stranger. It takes what you felt or experienced and turns it into language. That's the whole point.

Before you write, the feeling lives inside you messy, heavy, without any clear shape. But the moment you find words for it, you pull it out of yourself and give it form on the page. You give it edges. And once it has edges, you can step back, look at it, and even set it aside. That's why writing to forget and writing to remember are basically the same. Both are attempts to take the experience from inside and put it somewhere else. The page becomes a container for what you can no longer hold.

My real question is "What do you need this experience to become?"

A wound that finally has a name?
A person you're not ready to let go of?
Or a part of yourself you're trying to understand?

You write because some things are too big to just feel and move on. And the page is how you survive it—not by erasing it or freezing it forever, but by turning it into something you can finally look at.

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Lettera VII. I don't even know where to begin with this.

Some days I wake up and I'm so sure—sure that staying was the wrong call, sure that I deserve better, sure that this whole thing has been slowly hollowing me out from the inside. Then something shifts, I don't know what, maybe the way you said my name or just the memory of how it feels when things are good between us, and all that certainty just vanishes. Suddenly second guessing everything, wondering if I'm just being dramatic and blowing it out of proportion.

That's the part that's killing me. Not even you—it's that I can't trust my own mind anymore.

Because I know. I know I shouldn't be treated this way. That part is crystal clear to me, it really is. But love just comes rushing back like it didn't get the memo, like it never heard a single thing I told myself in the mirror at 2 AM. And it's not some small, fragile love either. It's the kind that makes leaving feel almost impossible, like trying to picture a color that doesn't exist.

I want to be there for you. I still do. And you still care about me, I know that too. But that's almost what makes it worse. Because how am I supposed to hold both truths at the same time? That you love me, and that there's still someone else living rent free in your head?

Where does that even leave me?

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Lettera VI. There's something I really admire about people who can forgive easily. I'm not one of them.

I can forget things, or at least, I can let time slowly bury them. But forgetting and forgiving are two completely different things, and I think people confuse the two more than they realize. I've tried. I've sat with it and told myself "just let it go, move on, be the bigger person" but no matter how hard I try, there's this stubborn little voice in my head that keeps asking "why should you forgive someone who betrayed you, who hurt you without even thinking twice about it?" And honestly? I don't have a good answer for that.

Sometimes people come back and say sorry. And I say "it's okay" because what else are you supposed to say in that moment? You're standing there, they're looking at you, and the word just comes out. But the moment it does, there's this strange discomfort that settles in my chest, like something's off. Like I just said something that wasn't true.

I think that's what it is—when you force forgiveness before you actually feel it, it's basically just a polite lie. My mouth moves, the word leaves, but my heart knows better.

Maybe I'm wrong for feeling this way. Maybe I should be more like those people I admire, the ones who seem to release things so easily. But saying "I forgive you" before you actually do is its own kind of dishonesty. And my heart, apparently, refuses to go along with it.

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Lettera V. Isn't it just so pretty to think all along there was some invisible string tying you to me?

All of the moments you had before All the hearts that fell apart were just that string unraveling, only to tie us and bring you to me. Funny how I believe a single red string of fate was tying us together.

All those late night you cried alone The years you spent searching in all the wrong faces The loves that unraveled and left you in pieces None of it was loss.

Our meeting was no accident. That I think it was already written in our story From the moment we were born, we were already given to each other.

Everything before me was fate learning how to find you. And every step I took, was just the thread that tied me to you.

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Lettera IV. You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.

Nobody tells you that being in love can be warm and heavy at the same time, but that kind of warm doesn't comfort you, it just reminds you of everything you afraid to lose.

Some mornings I wake up and there's this little ache right in my chest, like my heart's already bracing for the day he might not be here anymore. I'm so in love with him it scares me. I know it the way you know a song without remembering when you first heard it. But loving someone this much makes you aware of how much you have to lose. Before him, losing someone was just a concept. Now it has a face, a laugh, a way of saying my name that I catch myself replaying in my head.

People see me and they ask why I look so far away, "You're in love, arent you?" as if it's all supposed to be sunshine and butterflies. Like it should be enough to keep the sadness out. I just smile and nod. Yeah, I am. Because I can't explain that the love and the sadness live in the same place now. They don't fight—they just hold each other, right behind my ribs, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

So yes I seem pretty sad. And yes, I am so in love. I'm just carrying a lot of love, and this quiet sadness for something that hasn't even happened yet.

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Lettera III. You don't get to choose love without choosing grief too.

Nobody tells you that when you let someone in, you're also making a kind of quiet agreement. Not with them—with something older, something you don't get to negotiate with. When you're choosing this, you're also choosing everything that comes after it.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately. How love doesn't just arrive and sit still. It moves through you, rearranges things, leaves fingerprints on the parts of you that you forgot were even there. And then sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once, it ends. Or the version of you that loved them that way ends. And what's left is grief, standing in the doorway like it's been waiting the whole time. That's the thing nobody really prepares you for. Grief isn't the opposite of love. It's what love becomes when it has nowhere left to go. All that feeling, still fully alive in you, still reaching and nothing there to receive it anymore. So it turns inward, and it aches.

I used to think grief was a sign that something had gone wrong. That if I had loved better, or held on differently, or let go at the right moment, I could have avoided it. Now I think grief is just the receipt. Proof of what was real. You don't mourn what didn't matter. You only grieve as deep as you loved.

And maybe that should be comforting. Maybe it is, a little. But mostly it just means that the bigger the love, the longer you sit with what it leaves behind. That's the deal. That's always been the deal. We just sign it without reading it, because we're too busy falling.

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Lettera II. In a world that makes it easy to feel nothing, I chose everything.

Loving with all my heart is both my greatest gift and, perhaps, my greatest flaw. I don't know how to do it halfway. Never did. I give and give until there's a hollow spot somewhere in my chest and wondering how I got here again. People call it beautiful. Sometimes it just feels like a wound I keep reopening.

I've lost things loving this way. Not just people but versions of myself. The girl who thought vulnerability was always rewarded. The one who stayed too long because she believed hard enough would eventually be enough.

And yet.

I don't know how to be angry about it for long. The grief comes, sits heavy for a while, then something shifts—not healing exactly, more like the pain finding a quieter place to live. I carry my losses differently now. Less like shame, more like old photographs.

I still love the same way. Recklessly, probably. But I've stopped apologizing for it. If I burn, at least I was warm. If I broke, at least I felt something real in a world that makes it very easy to feel nothing at all.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's everything.