"Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless."

G. K. Chesterton (English born Gabonese Critic, Essayist, Novelist and Poet, 1874-1936)

Disclaimer: I do not own The Perks of Being a Wallflower.


Dear Charlie,

I am that person that you wrote all of those things to. I don't even know how to begin this, because I know you and I don't know you and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be. I think your letters have helped me more in these last few months than sending them to me could ever have helped you, but I guess I can't know for sure. Please don't ask me how I found you because I don't want you to think that I'm crazy or be angry at me because really I just want you to know that yes, I read your letters. Like you, I am both happy and sad and trying to figure out how that could be.

Now I'm writing to you because I know, more than you ever knew about me, that you are that person who would know and understand. I felt the need to write this right now because it's been a really bad day. I've just been puttering around all day with that wired and tired feeling that I sometimes get but that never really seems to go away. I wanted to do, do, do, do, but I just wanted to lay there. For two hours I teetered on the edge, for a while things were pleasant and the window was open and the morning was beautiful and my cat was especially pleasant and the coffee was hot and rich and the air smelled so sweet and my robe was so plush. For a short while it was wonderful. Then I was so empowered I started to clean the living room. And after a while I sat on the couch and looked at the patterns in the rug and the paint splatters on the ceiling and the curls of the candle sconces and suddenly everything was very wrong. Existence in that moment was something sick and pervasive and I needed to crawl into a very quiet private place and wait for it all to be right again. I'm not sure if those moments are normal or abnormal or if they happen to everyone and only certain people like me stop and reflect on the suddenness of the attack and the aftermath it causes. This, Charlie, this I knew you would understand. Then I get stuck in the sick sad. So all day I wanted to get up and accomplish and yet couldn't bring myself to forsake the comfort of that silence. My mood gets a little wacky but again, I can't tell if it's something about me or if it's just that I acknowledge these moods, that I stop to reflect on the passing of everything.

Your honesty broke something Charlie. I never expected you to tell me so much, to reveal everything, and for what purpose Charlie? Somehow on the most lonely days last year I found your letters in the mail. Then things were okay.

The last few weeks have been so empty. I'm really feeling a certain absence of purpose. There were moments in the last few months when I could look at something as simple as a cup of coffee or a cute dog or a beautiful sky and feel infinite. (Thanks Charlie.) This morning the perfection of a moment about knocked me over in it's completion. It was nothing, and yet it was enough. A moment of completion that was enough to make me suddenly reflect on my emptiness. Then things became quiet.

There were moments this summer that were so intricate in their simplicity that even the memory makes me want to cry. The solitary moments, the ones that were just a butterfly landing perfectly on the shrub outside my front door, then I, standing quietly in the everyday chaos of my parking lot, enjoying the delicate flutter of wings.

After I calmed down this morning I went to the street fair with some friends. Something about the atmosphere at the Fair stabbed all the way through the layers of apathy surrounding me and landed smack between the ribs. It's odd. It's kind of ghastly even. Have you noticed how children are so often used in horror movies, something so innocent and cute surrounded by horror and gore is so much more disturbing. A ghoulish child scares you half to death but a zombie or something you would expect has become cliche. This is why I found the Fair so sickening. I found something subtle and beautiful about the heart of the little town because I always have a certain fondness for the character in the old brick buildings and small little hole in the wall places and diners and picturesque tree lined streets. Old news. So there I was, roaming the sidewalks with my face held high, looking in all of the old wavy glass windows, completely enthralled. I was searching for subtle details and my eyes kept meeting the eyes of strangers, then they would look away. Disturbed or something. I don't know. I guess if I was just walking through a fair with a funnel cake on the brain and some strange person met me square in the eyes and stared me straight through I would look away too. But I was kind of grossed out by the things going on in the fair. Some guys taking sideways glances and teeny bop butts and little boys smoking cigarettes and ten year old girls with cleavage and the whole scheme of everything. It doesn't get much dirtier in any way than a street fair. And even the enjoying, the enjoying of the company was all wrong. No one I hang out with anymore has the same appreciation for the same things as I do. I walk like a tornado, just wanting to see everything, and everyone else hangs back, wanting to do and experience.

I want to be one of the two friends sitting on a stoop in the canopy of a little tree with the first fallen leaves swirling around our feet while we smile in the silence and enjoy the company of the other. I want something simple. Instead I have my little sister with some kind of attitude and her older boyfriend who used to be my best friend, and the sexual tension in the air of a thousand people and my older brother flirting with my little sister's friend and my little brother just beginning to look at the world as a play ground and it was all very perfect in their company but all of our motives just a little bit off. I couldn't understand the mood or the atmosphere, it was tense and not. And it wouldn't have been, it didn't have to be.

Then of course the minor things. The constant worry of my parents on whether or not I am a bad influence to my younger siblings. Was I a bad influence? The thought was disturbing because in my head I had a very distinct image of myself and the gradual distancing that began between my image of myself and my reality that began around that time has been a serious form of discontent in my life. I don't know what I am. I am what my mother hated because I was a free spirit of sorts (?? best description I've got) because I am a free thinker and all that nonsense. But I think it should be refreshing. I don't get sometimes the fine line between refreshing and threatening as far as independence and free thought are concerned. I don't get exactly what I did to make them hate me. I existed I guess. I have to square with that and yeah the distance between myself and my family really hurts. I won't lie.

I read your letters Charlie, and I asked myself why every single time I reach out and it hurts me I reach again. But I have to. You know, I think it's like breathing in a burning room. It hurts every time you take a breathe because the air is hot and full of smoke. It sears your lungs, burns your nose and throat, catches you in a fit of coughing so intense you almost lose the chance to inhale for a second time, but yet you have to inhale again, and again, because you need air, regardless of the quality it's all you've got, and if you want to make it you have to go back again and again and force your vulnerable clean lungs to suck in the filth and wretched smoke it you ever intend to stop the fire.

What a night. I'm really tired. Really. I'm sorry for bothering you Charlie but you're like that friend I could sit with in the silence and know that you are also enjoying the subtle details, that friend who would be a part of the silence that puts it all back where it should be. I wish we could all deserve to have a moment like that in our existence, a Charlie moment that's so pure and perfect in its simplicity it's transcendent.

Again, Thank You Friend, for your letters and for not leaving me so lonely.