Open Letter Week - Letter to a girl at Starbucks, planning her wedding.

I'm embarking on a week of open letters.  How about you?  Do you have a letter in you that the world might like to read?  Post them to your blog and link up at the bottom of this post, so that I can check them out and maybe share them with my readers, too.

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An open letter to the girl at Starbucks on Monday, sitting with her fiance and wedding planner.

Dear girl with long brown hair,

I think you were sent straight from god, just for me.

I've been feeling mixed up, lately, and pent up and scatterbrained.  I've been telling people to love themselves, but hating my face in the mirror.  I've been short tempered with my husband and running our household in a kind of hyper acute sense where everything must be done my way, where everything must be done.

If you want to know a secret... I start telling people what to do when I'm not sure what the point of all this is.  I get bossier, the less confident I am, and I've been feeling underconfident.

You were sitting at table so that I had no choice but to see you every time I looked up from my computer screen.  I was writing an article about something I didn't care about, pausing every few minutes to stare into space and think about what to cook for dinner this week, or something equally as stupid.

I was looking through everything, not seeing anything, and I saw you.

You were wearing a pair of coral Capri pants and a turquoise t-shirt. Your hair was long and chocolate brown and flowing around your face and neck like a silky wild vine.  I saw that you introduced yourself to a woman who had been waiting at the table alone, and you said, "This is my fiance," gesturing to a plain looking man wearing plain colors and existing all wrong and muted next to you.  You smiled and shook the woman's hand and I thought that you might be the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.

But, I get like that, sometimes.  I get gray and muddy, inside and the world is full of distractions, and to save myself, I start falling in love all over the place.

It hasn't happened in a while, because I was taking a little blue pill for the baby blues.  (If you want to know another secret... I got very, very blue after having my babies.  So blue, in fact, that I thought I might not make it to the end of every day.  So blue that I thought I was dying, that my heart would seize and stop in my chest.)  I took those pills for almost two years, and only recently got brave enough to stop them.

I wanted to feel something, again.  I wanted to be able to get worked up.  It had been a very long time since I'd been myself, since I felt passionate and wild and fiery.  I wanted to feel those things, again.  Except that, when I stopped taking the pills, all I felt was an inability to concentrate and a sense of being pressured, like I was running late for everything, even when I didn't have anywhere to be.  I started getting all snippy and controlling, like I mentioned before.  I couldn't muster up the initiative to go for a bike ride or dead lift my awesome heavy weights.  I found myself stewing in a milieu of Trader Joes Doritos and indecision.  I felt more like myself than I had in a long, long time... and I was totally unequivocally hating it.

That's what I was doing at Starbucks at 7pm on a weekday.  I was supposed to be getting out of the house, doing something, and getting my shit together.  I thought if I went out, I might be able to get some work done.  That I'd actually write something, instead of checking on the progress of the tomatoes in my garden for the fifth time that day.

So, there you were, a bolt of color and soft round curves and the rest of the world was a dull hum of fuzz and white.  Your nails were painted orange and you laughed.  I looked down at myself, wrapped up in navy blue jersey and hating my body, how uncomfortably I bulged in places and couldn't sit up straight to save myself.  Your body was immaculate, and I hope you knew it.  You were bigger than I am, and your skin was white, like porcelain.  You were a fat girl, the same kind of girl I'd been wrinkling up my nose at in the mirror, lately, and I wanted to lay you down in the grass and dew and peel the cute, color coordinated clothing from your immaculate body.  I knew how your dark hair would stand out against your skin, how soft you'd be, and how pink and perfect.  I wanted to give you a secret, something to make you blush.

You were there planning your wedding, looking through a giant binder of details, and all I could think about was wrecking it.

I wanted to walk up to you, introduce myself, and then pledge to make you squirm and coo in ways that this dull, brown on brown on khaki fiance of yours couldn't dream.  I wanted to kiss the bend in your arm at the inside of your elbow.  I wanted to be a black demon on an unshoed horse whipping through your life like a hurricane.  I wanted to tell you that you were the hottest girl that god ever made, not that god has anything to do with anything.

I didn't, though, of course.  I didn't really want to do those things.  I just wanted them for you, for your beauty, for making the world a more beautiful place.

You see, right before you walked into the coffee shop, I had been day dreaming about what an ugly, for shit person I am with my ragged nails and sagging belly.  I'd been lamenting the gray hairs at my temple, my creaky knee and ankle and feeling like the least attractive woman on the planet.  I'd been feeling like a big fat nothing, and then suddenly, I was looking at you, at how fucking sexy you were, and realizing that I've got a little bit of hot girl in me, too.  I was loving the shape of you because I love the shape of me, somewhere deep inside.  I wanted your body, because I love mine.

You woke me up, and put everything into focus.  If I could covet you for all the things I already possess, there wasn't anything wrong in the world.  I just hope your fiance realizes what he's got.  I hope he understands that he has to worship you, all of you in your soft, opalescent finery, that he has no choice but to fall at your feet, because I would, if I were him.  I hope that when you wake up in the morning and watch yourself brushing your pretty teeth, that you feel happy and lucky, because you should.  We all might be doomed to be the things we are, but that doesn't mean that we also can't be happy and lucky and free.

Love,
An admirer.


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Write an open letter to a crush or somebody you hate.  Write one to your dad or the president or your newborn son.  We don't care who you're writing to, just write a letter, and link up here.