Trigger warning: Suicide
Love Letters to the Dead is not a book you would pick up and bring with you on a vacation. It’s most likely the one that you would pick up at night when you’ve got nothing to do but twist and turn in your bed because sleep wouldn’t come. Then you start to think – are there things that you could’ve told someone but you just couldn’t, and decided to just put it in writing instead?
That was me, for a very long time. Putting my thoughts and my feelings into words in a notebook.
Until the notebook ended up in the wrong hands.
Laurel‘s truth is very much complicated, as it involves the suicide of her beloved sister that she can’t quite get over (honestly who easily would?), and about herself and the sensitivity of it. I could imagine how she must have felt, being torn between telling her new friends about her past and just creating a new life altogether, leaving all the hurt and the bitterness of her old life behind. It’s quite difficult when you finally found the sense of belongingness that you’ve always longed for, you finally know where you stood, only to be haunted by the images of the memories that could somehow ruin the comfort that you managed to create for yourself all this time. Laurel was scared of telling her new friends, Natalie and Hannah, and her boyfriend, Sky, the truth behind her sister’s death. What if they leave her, and she’s left all by herself again? She has already been caught in the idea that her Mom left her because she was to blame for her sister’s death, the fact that she saw everything.
And so she started writing these letters to the dead, which really started out as an assignment in English. There she pours her heart out, writing all the things she could have said to her parents, to her friends and to Sky. In the end, she gave herself the chance to speak to them at last, when the truth was already suffocating her. But come to think of it, it was also an opportunity for these people to prove themselves to be worthy of her friendship. It turned out that all of them got something to say, and everyone has already been burdened by each other’s truth that they could no longer seem to bear.
Most of the time, speaking about how we feel can lighten up our feelings. It’s way too easy to do this, but the hard part would be finding the right person to share them with. Someone who isn’t too righteous and judge-y, someone who’d say it is okay to make mistakes, to feel pain and to demand company.
