Book: If you find this letter ... How I found the meaning of life by writing hundreds of letters to strangers. Page 3

It's not as easy as it was back in the days when I was five years old and my best friend and I pretended to swap hair like it was helmets on our heads before running out onto the tarmac for a walk. She traded her rope braids for my orphan Annie haircut, and it seemed to us that there was nothing more beautiful than being someone else for a long thirty-five minutes. It turns out that this kind of mobility and vividness of the imagination reaches a peak and begins to fade around the age of thirteen. And yet, in that fitting room, I wanted to be someone else. To be someone in the spaces that surrounded me on all sides.

I loved playing the part where if you leave for a while, pictures and little trinkets will be waiting for you when you return. I'm not even trying to say it like an egotist. I just want to be needed. I want to be the kind of person you can miss if something happens and life changes and I'm no longer around.

Remembering all this, I wish everyone to experience such moments in life: moments when you realize that your hands are so incredibly small, and the world is so impossibly large. And these two facts do not add up. Perhaps recognizing the insignificance of one's own hands is the very first step towards changing anything.

Sometimes learning to be the best version of yourself takes a lot of plodding through the mud. No beauty. No rhythm. No "step by step" or coherent recipes. Just dirt.

She wrote on the back of the cover, "Promise you'll never forget me, because if I think you'll forget me, I'll never leave." One day we found this quote in the hostel, carved into an old wooden bunk. And, alas, she lost some of her value for us when we found out that Piglet was the first to say these words to Winnie the Pooh.

At some point, life pats you on the top of your head and hands you a list of what you can keep. This list is surprisingly long. You can keep letters. You can persist in your efforts. You can keep secrets and keep promises. You can stay steadfast on your path. You can keep his sweatshirt - the one he left on the living room floor. You can keep pictures and memories, but you can't keep people. People are not things, they cannot be saved.

I like to imagine that the details of New York, scattered in front of you for your reference, is his way of saying: “This thing, the life that you have, is a gift. I am not concrete. In fact, I am the landing pad for all the lives you can touch."

But maybe that's why people come into your life - to topple you and throw you out. Maybe they break into your life just to tell you they weren't supposed to be here. That you can't take them with you - and no one at all - wherever you go next. Maybe not every person we meet is a love story. Maybe some of these people are just a wake-up call.

I gave all my girlfriends the same rationale for why this stay in a vacuum suits me: There is a chance. No chance. There is a chance. No chance. Now I'm not surprised that people hesitate so long, believing that a gray story of kind-of-love may well suit them: sometimes you just want to get the crumbs that we get. I wanted to be chosen. I wanted to win. Love is not a game to win at all, but how I wanted it!

No matter how you look at it, it was a blinding train wreck, a collision between two people who didn't know how to give up on each other once and for all. I thought (and almost every cell in my brain was at attention, waiting) that he would leave her. So I opened the doors for him that I swore never to open. I laid out my complexes on the table, like playing cards. I pretended that I was the only one. But - no, I never planned to be that other girl.