Chapter Text
February 18th
Basil,
I could have written this on the twentieth of October and it would have been just as contrived, but I've been thinking of you a lot lately and I've never been very good with speaking, plus you and Anna were buried out of town. If I knew where you were, I couldn't visit yet anyways, its still too soon.
So I've been thinking about why you killed yourself. I don't blame you for it, but I want to confront it and so I've been trying to put a lot of thought into it. I know when I was spiraling last year it was always about Mari, about what we had done and how much pain we had caused. I thought about things from absolutes. Mari was good. Kel was good. Hero was good. You were bad. I was bad. And Aubrey was just weird, I didn't know what to think of her.
She was pretty fucked up. And she still is. Her problems are so different then ours, that I'm struggling to relate to her and figure out how to fix her make her feel better. Hero seems really good at it, that day he managed to get her out of the house, and even managed to settle some stuff between Aubrey and Kel. I think you would have been happy to hear that, maybe they told you through the door that night. I wasn't listening.
I didn't think about things as a network of different things coming together, I just saw it all as coming from the one thing. I wanted there to be an easy way to move past the pain from killing Mari, and I thought that thinking about all my other problems at all was unforgivably selfish. My brain told me that in order to right the wrong I needed to suffer punishment. And the only fitting punishment for murder was death. But it isn't, is it? And Mari wasn't our only problem.
Dyeing wouldn't make it better, It was just a way for me to escape from confronting myself, and confronting everything. I wanted to die, because the alternative was living without Mari, and living with a me who had killed her. But I want to live, I was lying to myself about wanting to die, and when I became aware of that, I decided I still needed to be punished, so I tried to justify it anyways. I based whether I should live or die on if my friends forgave me or not, If things went well I would keep going, if they went bad I would stop. But my life has value and I want to live, it doesn't matter if they forgive us, or if they ever love us again. I realized that just in time, and it saved me.
If you're still here in some way, I miss you, and I wish you hadn't left. Sorry for leaving for so long. But I promise, I'm not leaving again until the universe drags me kicking and screaming.
I'll keep this promise,
Sunny