Dear person I hate, (for Elowyn!)
I had everything you didn’t get to have.
I had a warm bed, the certainty of three square meals each and every day with snacks in between, a sturdy roof over my head with rambling grounds, clothes that were not worn or tattered and, if they did tear, we could afford to not just fix them, but replace them. I had a fine education, and I lived in a beautiful home, in a beautiful place, isolated from people who would want to hurt me.
I had everything you didn’t have.
I had endless silences with nothing but my own voice to keep me company, or music that I created myself. I had solitude with only my imagination to keep me from going entirely mad. I had rambling libraries and every hobby I could ever dream of learning, languages to teach myself, woodland creatures to play with because my parents thought a pet that lived in the house would be dirty. I had bloody knuckles from being hit over and over again with a ruler because my mind did not conform to how my mother wanted it to learn, too eager to go outside and feel and experience things rather than read them from a textbook.
I had my mother tell me my accomplishments were not enough for the family name, and I had my father lock me up in a cage that was our home. It was very pretty, and it was very comfortable, and I know many people would ask what pains I could possibly have, what could possibly be wrong with the life I was given.
It was everything anyone would want.
Stability. Certainty. Money.
Friends that were paid to put up with me.
Finding comfort in kitchens and in stars and in moons because no one else had the time of day for me.
Peers that would give the gil back to my parents rather than endure my presence and lack of social skills because of lack of socialization.
I had everything, Gabriel. There’s no reason for me to complain, or so you might think. You might think that people who have money have no right to be unhappy, that the phrase ‘money can’t buy happiness’ is a phrase made up by the wealthy to give them an excuse to whine.
But it can’t. It didn’t. I had all the gil in the world, everything at my fingertips but freedom and choice.
It was like being a small fish in a big tank, and it was decorated very prettily, with lots of nooks and crannies to hide… but the big tank was set in front of a glass wall that showed me the entire ocean. I could see all the fish living freely, doing whatever they pleased, playing together and developing friendships, but that was all. I could only watch. I could not jump out of my tank and into the sea, because the lid was sealed on very tightly.
My parents would feed me, and they would clothe me, and then they would have no time. I would cry from a nightmare and be sent back to bed, the door locked from the outside so that I would not disturb their work, told I was being silly and that my imagination was running too wild. I was not coddled, and this can, of course, be a good thing. But it wasn’t. It was too much for a small child to endure. When I cried because of real things that truly went bump in the night, I was shrugged off. Told to be quiet. To be rational.
Told my daydreams and the way I saw the world was… not right. That I was not right. That my place was at home, silent, to watch and not to touch.
You suffered, Gabriel. This I cannot deny. You have suffered greatly, and you have no idea how much that pains me to know. As furious as you make me, as much as I would like to hate you, I know how much pain you carry in you. My heart aches for you.
Even still… I wish you could understand. I wish you would not be like so many others who have told me what I have endured means nothing simply because the outside looks so glistening and pretty.
A gold cap on a tooth is still covering rot.
