The Letter I Wrote to My Bully in Standard Eight
I found it in a box. I decided not to send it.
The letter is in a box under my bed, in an envelope that has gone soft with age. It is addressed to a boy named Vikram who made my standard eight year a misery, and I wrote it the summer after, when I was thirteen and full of the kind of rage that only a thirteen-year-old can hold.
I don't remember writing it. I remember the year, and I remember Vikram, and I remember the way he would wait for me by the water cooler and the specific way he laughed. The letter is the evidence that I was angry enough to write it down.
I found it last month, cleaning the room before a move. It is four pages long, front and back, and it is the most honest thing I have ever written. It names everything. The things he said, the things he did, the way he made me feel small in a hallway full of people. It is not a poem but it is closer to a poem than anything I wrote that year.
I sat on the floor and read it, all four pages, and I expected to feel the anger again. I didn't. I felt a strange, distant pride, the pride of a person who had survived a thing and written it down and put it in a box and moved on.
I didn't send it. I never meant to. The letter was not for him; it was for me. It was the proof that I had felt it and named it and put it somewhere safe. The box under the bed is not a shrine to the hurt; it is a record of the surviving.
I don't know what happened to Vikram. I hope he grew up. I hope he is kind now. I hope he doesn't remember me at all, which is the kindest thing a bully can do, forget the person they hurt so the hurt can be forgotten too.
The letter is still in the box. I will move it again when I move, because it is not a letter to him. It is a letter to the person I was, and I am still that person, and I still need to know that I wrote it down and survived it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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