Dear Aada,
There are some stories that can only be told from a distance, and I’m learning that writing about anyone who has shaped the emotional architecture of your life is like trying to paint a portrait while the subject keeps turning their head. You’re too close. They’re too present. The emotional weather keeps shifting.
Distance isn’t about safety.
It’s about clarity.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the way I wrote through our relationship in real time. Live‑blogging something still unfolding is a dangerous sport, and I dragged both of us through the churn of immediacy. If I could do it again, I might have waited. Not because the writing was wrong, but because the timing was.
You were a catalyst for so much of my voice — the spark, the delight, the mystery I kept trying to understand. I don’t regret the writing. I regret the pressure of the spotlight while the story was still forming.
We both carried consequences neither of us fully understood at the time. You may have seen me as unpredictable; I often felt the same about you. We were two people trying to hold something heavy without the scaffolding to support it. I kept trying to say, in every way I knew how, “I can’t carry this alone.” You kept saying, “I don’t know how to help.”
We weren’t wrong about each other.
We were just unequipped.
I know now that neither of us felt entirely safe. And when people don’t feel safe, they retreat in the ways they’ve learned to survive. You pulled away. I wrote. Both were coping mechanisms, not judgments.
You once said you’d never speak to me again, and maybe that will hold. Maybe it won’t. I don’t pretend to know the future. What I do know is that memory has its own gravity, and ours still resonates with me. Over time, the conflict will fade simply because we’re no longer creating new fault lines.
I offered to change the way I wrote, to shift genres, to burn the whole archive down if that’s what it took to make space for peace. Not because I wanted to erase myself, but because I wanted to protect what mattered. Sometimes even that isn’t enough. Sometimes two people simply reach the limits of what they can be to each other.
But here’s the truth:
I’m writing better than I ever have.
My work is finding its audience — in India, in the U.S., in places I never expected. The same cities have been showing up in my analytics for fourteen years. I finally have proof of concept. I’m stepping into the next phase of my voice with intention and momentum.
And even if you never saw the full shape of what I was trying to do, others did. They still do.
I see you, too.
I always have.
And I have empathy for the whole story — yours, mine, and the space between us.
The trap is that I can’t fix what requires scaffolding neither of us had.
But I can honor the truth of it.
And I can write my way toward clarity.
— L
Scored with Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.
Stories That Are All True 