Note: I am in the process of archiving my writings disperced across social media platforms on my own website here. This is a mirror post of my personal essay “(cringe) processing #2: Flying Letters" on my Substack page (cringe) processing.

I dedicate this short personal essay to Xiaohua, my first confidant and one of the most formative persons in my life, who has stayed forever nineteen.

Hey, Xiaohua. I am writing again.

I miss you, but I no longer think of you on your birthday. In fact, I no longer remember when your exact birth date is. I do remember you are an august leo while I am a july cancer. I do remember an internet search predicted our cosmic incompatibility, which explains our short but intense friendship.

Is it weird that I miss you even more now that I am in my 30s? Of course you come up in my therapy sessions once in a while. But you also casually pass through my mind as I go about my days, like a piece of cloud.

I hope you don’t mind me playing Coldplay’s “Yellow” on repeat as I write this piece. It was your favorite song back when you were fifteen (shrug).

Do you remember our nightly sad emo convos, dark feelings, and ugly fantasies? Do you even know about all the cringe passages I wrote in process of us in the years after on QQ空间 (QZone)?

I’d like to attribute you as the source of me being the cringey writer that I was in high school even though we both know that’s not the truth. But I don’t want to credit my helicopter parents who were emotionally unavailable slash immature slash abusive. I didn’t know it then, but my survival instinct was so strong that I had to write. I was crying for help through words.

The act of writing itself saved me long before I started and worked hard through therapy. Writing was not a choice but a matter of survival. I wrote from a place of deprivation and desperation. With zero emotional education but suppression from my parents, I felt swallowed by so much pain and many unnamed big complicated feelings.

Unknowingly, writing became how I react, relate, fantasize, cope, process, and release. I was so in need of spaces to write and any audience who can hear my pain that essay assignments in Chinese and English classes became the new dumping ground of my yearnings, emotions, traumas, and fantasies. The real passive suicidal thought of jumping off of our building made it into a short story that alerted the poor young english teacher and yet I had to deny the validity of these thoughts in my meeting with the principle by attributing them as fiction to avoid troubles.

I do not have a record of any of our writings but my memory. More than fifteen years later, I still remember dwelling in the ugly darkness of your words on the now obsolete instant messaging service 飞信 (Fetion), literally flying letters. Like our short lived friendship, Fetion peaked in 2010 and declined in 2011 in the face of 微信 (WeChat). At this very moment, I am actively combatting my academic instinct to turn this memory into an anecdote to illustrate a footnote in Chinese internet history and teenage digital writings. But that’s for another time and a different audience.

I just clicked on your WeChat again after all these years. June in our hot humid subtropical hometown is supposed to instantly melt everything. But your profile is still frozen in June 2015.

“The end.” “Closure.” These words took me back to 2011 and my many cryptic messages on Fetion that I posted to the world but directed at you. These words took me back to 2013 and those now lost apology/closure messages from you on WeChat. These words took me back in 2010 when you shared your darkest thoughts with details I can no longer remember clearly. I do recall imageries of blood, knife, scar, and a bottomless void. I know they have to do with our birth family and the pain they inflicted upon us intentionally or not. We were screaming for help, yearning for love, and trying to sooth our wounds through words.

I do wonder what kind of writer you would have grown into. Would you have followed your dreams of becoming a researcher slash professor? Global backpacker slash Lonely Planet writer? BBC documentary producer? Sherlock Holmes?

I slowly lost touch with this side of me for a long time. I have spent the past decade learning, practicing, and writing like an academic. I am not half bad at it, but I have been really dreading it in recent years. I am returning to personal writing again to reconnect with that part of me that I have neglected over the years. I’m blogging again for myself, however cringe that may sound, to reshape my relationship to writing and to learn more about myself. So here I am, remembering the writer I used to be and opening up the possibility of the writer I might become.

I hope you have had a freeing eleven years wherever you are now. Have you continued writing in whatever form it takes?

Until next time.