"Broken lives and fragile hearts", an open letter by Tessa N Friends
Hey, my name is Tessa, I like pine trees, colorful socks tea with mint and lemon. And I want to tell you a very special story. I believe stories have the power to make things last. And I want this to last. It is a stiffy June night, my mind is foggy from sleep deprivation, yet I am so exited I can not sleep. The story must be put into words tonight.
Fear of endings found me in the doorway of our first apartment at the mature age of four. The realization I can never ever come back in time, hit me hard. How time slips through my tiny fingers, and how I can never catch it nor make it stop, which suggests that, eventually, everything I know will end, including myself, and there will be nothing left. The thought turned out to be too much for a four-year-old and led to my first mental breakdown. At least, from the ones I remember.
Time, for sure, never stops, but for some time I just tried to avoid thinking of that concept, as well as of the fact my family was constantly smashing into tiniest pieces of people, who had given up. I just drifted somewhere in between, reading fantasy books and composing piano music, searching for aliens at the backyard of my godmother’s house.
As I grew older and changed half a dozen of shabby temporary apartments with no room for me, the fear of temporariness has grown into acceptance of that fact. I feel like, before some point in my life, I was just going with the flow, but, when the time came, I suddenly felt alive, more alive than I have ever felt in my life. The world was calling me, like it is calling you when you are fourteen, and the whole universe is at your feet, like you can make your life amazing, just hold out your hand and you’ll get everything you want. For me, the recipe of an amazing life, until nowadays, stays simple: music and friends, and a little bit of adventures so I would have stories to tell.
As a kid, I was lacking positive scenarios of maturing, even if I didn’t realized that, so I was scared, of ending up giving up on everything I believed in, stopping loving things I never wanted to let go of, of losing myself on that crazy way. And that is where stories played their part, I found my positive scenarios and inspiration in books, movies, and music -- made by, for, and about people who made it in a way that made me less terrified of life.
At fifteen, I suggested to my friend to make our lives into the greatest story ever, and definitely a happy one. That kind of story that make you feel warm and at home, that gives you hope happily ever after exists. To create a world, where we would be welcomed and loved, a strange family for the lost ones. Couple of years prior I made a decision to become a… well, I guess thirteen-year-old me would call it great, I wanted to become a great musician.
At the end of the day, I was just craving for something long-lasting, after all this temporary homes, a never constant feeling of being loved, the struggle to love myself - I just wanted to make it right for myself from the start, not messed it up like all these the silly adults before me. I was stepping into my “adult” life (we all feel extremely adult at fifteen, aren’t we?).
So, I had it all planned, no blank spaces left: I make a career in music, I stick to my group of friends, with no alarms and so surprises, nothing falls apart, and we end up being happy ever after, forever and ever.
Things… messed up at some point. I try to bare no regrets, but I can’t help but think of how I have spent too much time trying to fill the gap between the person I am and the person I want to be. The story of what happened was much more complicated, yet beautiful. A story about how everything always takes longer longer and turns out to be more complicated when you think from the first glance. I always felt like I was running out of time. I knew everything was going to end someday, but they don’t tell you the timing, aren’t they? And I couldn’t make my peace with that, as a teen, I was so angry with that. It felt like the end was coming any minute.
It is a horrible delusion to live with: as a teen, I got myself everything I could possibly want and still lived with a constant fear of losing it. I wish someone told me, that, in the very end, it is not the ending and beginning, that matters, but all the things lying in between these two points. But we were happy, so happy, and these (as always, never-lasting!) moments of happiness were totally worth it all. On the other side of these moments of absolute happiness there are moments of absolute sadness, because, as my favorite book says, “You can’t protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself happiness” (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).
I come from a family of classical musicians, which means I loved music before I was even born, but the expectations were set too high too, people expect to be special, and I guess I wanted that too? Mostly, wanted someone to believe in me. I gave up on trying to figure out if I am good enough or not, but… some things in music worked out naturally for me, and some didn’t. One of those things that didn’t were singing, and this one happened to be the one I am so passionate about.
The idea of expressing yourself through your own voice looked powerful and liberating from the outside, but on the inside, I was terrified that my voice and ears are not enough, that it is something wrong with my brain, that led to straining and very slow progress: when 90% of your brain is busy thinking if you are even capable of making it, there are only 10% left to really practice and learn. I went to a music school and studied music theory there, and there and there a huge part of me was crushed into a pieces as the result of mental abuse that lasted four years. That happened a year after I decided to make my life the best story ever. Well, at least you can’t say the plot is boring!
My own complicated relationships with musicianship only became worse, but back then I was stuck with the thought “it’s not a big deal, everyone who goes to the music school lives through something like that”, I was wrong. It was a big deal, which impacted my personality, and my relationships with people, and infected perfect world a group of fifteen-year-olds built with such care and love. The fight was real, and I made it out not only alive, but also more of a person I always wanted to see myself, from some angles. From some angles, I was completely fractured.
But it was not the end! The story went on. The story of finding my way back home, back to love and happiness, back to music, and back friendship, to the parts of yourself you never hoped to get back.
This is a story about growing up, overcoming fears, and learning -- will. It is a group of friends. Their tiny perfect yet fragile world, a story about maturing, a story about facing your own fears, about speaking up the truth you are afraid to speak. About wildest dreams, the good and the evil, and probably a little bit about time travel, just because I love time travelling. But most importantly, this story is a love letter to all the amazing people I’ve met in my life. A story about how timing is not always right, how sometimes if someone, or something, is gone, it doesn’t mean they are gone forever, how sometimes love is more important than time or distance, and how sometimes love is not enough.