Letter to an unknown friend

Hi DW,

I don't know you personally. In fact, I don't even know your name. You probably don't know mine either, and to be perfectly honest I wouldn't be writing to you like this if not for the rather exceptional circumstances I stumbled upon these last couple of days.

Let me elaborate: you see, brainjuice is confessedly a rather lazy, certainly inconsistent blogger. The only times she really posts blogs is when she has some time at work (guiltily), also partly because she does not have a computer at home. It's been a month since she last blogged, or had the time to blog because she was moving offices and jobs and didn't have the time to even read.

So coming back to the whole blogging affair I found myself deprived shockingly of your blog... and had to do a bit of sleuthing to realise what happened. Because I'm out of the blogging circuit for so long, I certainly have no idea what re-minisce was referring to either in his blog about you... and now that your blog is shut there is no way for me to really know what's been happening in your life.

Here's what I find mildly disconcerting about this whole blogging business: although I really do not know why you have chosen to shut down "amongst other things", and although I was very sad to find out about it, I also realise that my desire to read your blog is a kind of intrusion in itself. Who am I but a passer-by stopping by the roadside, agape at the spectacle of another person's private life?

Yet, you have undoubtedly laid bare your thoughts, your heart and your soul on your blog for other people to read them. And me, I do the same. We all do when we blog.

Let's put aside for a moment all that has been said about what makes writing beautiful. As formerly a teacher of Literature I can tell you that to a great extent beauty is subjective. Even in the simplest of prose there is beauty.. read Gertrude Stein and other American transcendentalist writers. To me, you do what you do well. The beauty in your writing is that you are so honest and unafraid in laying down life in its most stripped down form - the unadorned experiences of heartbreak, insecurities, and observations. And because of that, I do find myself reading your daily musings.

Maybe I do so as a bemused spectator, but so what? I do so acknowledging that you are an individual in the flesh entitled to your emotional response to life and the curve balls God throws you in life. The disembodied voice may never be associated with a human face that I can recognise if we were ever to rub shoulders in a crowded MRT train or on the bus. But I recognise the voice. It's something I have seen, or heard, or felt somewhere in someone else. Or in a book I read a long time ago.

Don't stop writing. I honestly don't know why you are - if you are as what other bloggers suggest - depressed. But this is no reality TV - and I am no fan of intruding on other people's private lives. I don't expect to really ever understand what exactly you are going through as though it is any business of mine to begin with. But I just thought I'd drop this entry to you to let you know that you do deserve better. I'm in total agreement with Re-minisce on this point.

Can I offer a word of encouragement from the Bible too?

21 When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
22 I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.

23 Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.

-Psalm 73: 21 - 26

A little prayer, said in contrition, is lifted high on angels wings and is whispered in the ears of Him who watches over you. A drop of tear, shed for a christian brother, heralds a thunderstorm of God's compassion.