I LIVE YOU

Iride, Italy

Love letter to the artist between the ages of 18 and 25

I think it’s a rite of passage for the young artist to feel like the most evil person to have ever existed. And I am being exactly that on a very normal Tuesday evening, which is happening right now, laughing at me with me. I’m making good use of the little time I have left in which tomorrow morning’s responsibilities are still not that important; that is why I don’t feel too guilty wasting my best sleep hours on overused rhetoric motifs like the undiscovered prodigy I undoubtedly am. I, too, take a strange kind of pleasure in thinking I’m only going to be recognized tragically, decades after I’m dead—and I say “too” because, in the end, we are all carbon copies of each other, not that I would want to be anything else. As a kid, I only felt loved bedridden—since then, I don’t think I have changed much.

I rarely keep resolutions, but I’m trying to become more honest. That is why I just changed “worst” to “most evil,” because it felt more true, and that is also why, this morning, when I texted a friend about her writing and typed “I live you” instead of “I love you,” I kept it, because it was more true, because I live her everyday, scribbling on napkins and schoolwork and office papers like I do with this strangest love letter, you faceless human, how odd it is, I bet we are the same, in this very moment?

I can’t say your name and you feel like I feel, we have the same face and I’m writing to you, it’s gotten to three and now chances are you just have too much time to think while the most evil person is out there plotting the next American mass murder.

You can rest your eyes now, I promise I’ll take what is keeping you up for myself, I’ll even find a way to sing about it, so you can enjoy the first good night’s sleep in a long while.

May you have many more years of sudden awakes, poems after thoughts, after feelings, after conversations; rageful words growing old as quiet hums, after the sacred and after the mundane that is more sacred; a hundred years of is this about me? and a hundred more of yes, but not in a way you would ever understand, and I will always want to know all about it. May you inspire, may you live with purpose and meaning like I live you with purpose and meaning. May the world stretch for your words like a loving mother’s womb. I know it has not been very kind to people like you and I; may you never give in.

May you be plagued with a lifetime of questions you may learn to hold like a father his firstborn.

I often worry about my thought not coming from high enough places, that I have not read enough or lived enough, but then I remember one of my favourite poems was written by an eight-year-old child. They said, I will walk until I find the perfect thing.

I’m nowhere near as wise as them, therefore I’m probably wrong, but I think I hope to spend my whole life walking. May you, too, spend your whole life walking, and may I be your witness, even silently, for a couple steps—and above all else, may you never find the answers you are looking for.

I live you, and we will never die.

Iride is a 21 year old music student who, at the moment, is self taught in poetry. Her pronouns are she/her.