Letter to a Stranger

Whatever you do,
Wherever you roam,
Whoever you touch,
However brief the smile,
You’ll always leave a part of yourself behind,
Since people, places and moments
Grow a memory of their own.

Through the silent stroke of your presence,
You keep changing my existence,
By little or by much,
Forever.

I wrote the Letter to a Stranger a long time ago, for someone long forgotten; or maybe was it for no one in particular?

Why do we spend so much time running away from our past and slashing the ties that bind us to it, when these are the essence of who we are today?

A million moments and a thousand faces have lead me precisely where I stand now, but there is one big flaw in the fashionable theory of living “here and now”: there is no such thing as the present!

Dreams, ideas and hopes float around in a misty future; one day they suddenly rush towards you, overwhelming and brutal, changing shape, loosing their color. And then they are gone. So we cast the pain aside, draw a line and erase our emotional links to those past experiences. We pretend to live in the present.

And by doing so we become ghosts of ourselves. Mere reflections of who we could have been. Refusing to accept that yesterday commanded today’s act is worse than refusing to live late. It’s accepting to die early.