Maybe it’s because I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, but the ocean has never been about sunshine. It’s where I go to remind myself that I am both small and connected to every other thing on this planet. It’s where I go to cleanse wounds. It’s where I go to feel light, but not unweighted. Everything I have that is too much, I can let go, and the ocean will take it. Whenever I want something to be lost, I can give it to the ocean.

But what about those pesky messages in bottles?

Is something lost if you don’t care who finds it?

Sometimes it feels like writing is a message in a bottle, for as much as you can strategize about your target audience, you can’t ever know who it’s going to touch. For example, my target audience is queer women and genderqueer people in their 20s and 30s, but that says so little about who my audience really is.

My audience are people who still think about their best friend from middle school, even when it’s been over a decade since they last spoke to them. My audience are people who took abuse, not out of love but because of guilt. My audience are people who let their assumptions erase real love, only to find out that they are still loveable. My audience are people who have a favorite tree. My audience are people who think the afterlife is composed of the living.

Maybe my bottle will find them, maybe it won’t, but it only takes one person to read a message, and then it exists forever.

I don’t really know how I’m going to use this newsletter. Announcements, if I have them, for sure, but maybe also longform thoughts that don’t have a place anywhere else? A journal some people read? Random lines of a poem I thought of but can’t place anywhere else?

I’ve been thinking about letters. If you know me and my writing, you know I romanticize letters. They are a duet of immortality, pieces of your soul that you spread far and wide. Words that are yours, but you don’t get to keep. You only get to keep other’s words, the ones they feel fit to send to you, which may not even be the ones that live in their heart. Because, nowadays, who would risk their confessions in a medium that is so easily lost? Why would you compound the risk?

But isn’t that the fun of it? To do away with instant gratification and properly sit with your emotions, regardless of how your correspondent replies? Isn’t half the fun of life in the not knowing? Why open the box when it’s more important to believe the cat you can’t save is alive?

If you’re reading this, it’s a confession.

If you’re reading this, you’re opening a box.

And if you’re reading this, the words belong to you now.

Love,

Yuliya