We had stopped on our first night in the forest. Rilu had shown me some of the things in his satchel at the Crater’s Edge. I had annexed a notebook from him since he didn’t appear to be getting much use out of it. I hadn’t written anything yet, nor did I really have any ideas, but I knew what I wanted to write about something.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to get some time to myself. The path in the forest was easy, but the scale of the trees as we walked further in was unfathomable. And the ‘moss’ that looked far too much like glowing ancient runes didn’t exactly make me feel too safe alone.

I was only alone because Rilu didn't want to eat more rations, so he headed out to hunt. I hadn't seen any animals in the forest regardless. I figured that was because of Rilu, but he had assured me nothing here would approach me. I decided to trust him. Considering all that he had done for me, letting me die now would be anticlimactic if nothing else.

He disappeared from sight in a burst of flame, which would have been a cool exit, should I have not heard a distinctly high-pitched yelp and the thunderous applause of a falling tree the size of a redwood seconds after. I was no longer sure how much I trusted him.

It was nice to have a pen in my hand again, so I figured I’d call it even and not poke fun at him for it later. Applaud my astounding self-control.

So, knowing I had no more excuses, I began to let myself write.

Dear Olivia,

I shouldn’t have written to you first. You’re the only one who can’t read this, but I need to say this as if you will. So, whatever god or lack thereof’s out there, please let at least these first words reach you somewhere.

I only want this one thing, to tell you that I still don’t get it. I don’t think I ever will. Even if I’ve come closer than anyone else to understanding.

I’m glad I could say that.

There’s nobody else I can yell to about it again right now. Maybe it’s easier to do it to you because I know you’ll never be able to listen. But I hope not.

I don’t think I want you to read to the rest.

But I need to put them out anyway, or I’ll never leave this guilt behind. Whatever happens, I know I wouldn’t be satisfied leaving this incomplete. I guess I should start from the beginning. I've changed a lot recently, and I've only been able to think about these things on a large scale. The details get hazy.

We met back in 2019, freshman year of highschool. You were a bit older, held back a year. When I asked you why, you just smiled at me.

That smile echoed on in my thoughts. It made me uneasy and I had no idea why.

Back then, it was only in the back of my mind, making me avoid you in Creative Writing, the only class we had together. I was so much higher in every academic standard, the highest I could be. And I was happy on top. People respected me and everyone else in my position. And if they didn't, we could just say they'd never amount to anything as we went on with our passionless, predefined lives.

I was content, I had that as my worth. The potential to go on and do something, a something that didn't really matter. I didn't need to care about it, I didn't need to choose it for myself, I just needed to amount to something. I think here's where I say thank you for making me think about why I felt that way.

But back then I was smart, and that was all that I needed to be. I think that was why it was so difficult to respect you. And why the memories of that smile made me feel so lost and doubtful. How it made me unable to stop thinking about you even before we began interacting.

I did well in that class, as I did in all of my other ones. I did my work, I got my As and that was what mattered in my world. If I got good grades and test scores and went to college and worked under someone for the next 50 years I wouldn’t be a failure. I’d be worth the air I breathed. Yet, however you diverged, I couldn't see you as a freeloader-to-be as I claimed to. I think that, even back then, I knew this perspective was wrong deep down. I have a nasty habit of that; not caring to ask questions or change my perspective if something works for me.

The closest I came to understanding this in my conscious mind as well was when your assignment was featured as the best example. When you were praised by every single person in the room for your emotion, vision, creativity, and every other word that could be used to express how far above me you were.

I didn't get it; you didn’t try on your homework, you didn’t do well on tests, you didn’t get a good report by the end of the semester. But you were 'smarter' than me. Those values were another part of the strange amalgamation of vague 'good' qualities I assigned my worth to.

And you were the one who got recognition. I told myself it was like a dog doing a cool trick, and that lights shine brighter in the darkness. That the praise you got was because you were you, you were something where any amount of greatness was uncharacteristic.

Until I actually read it. And I hated that I agreed. That there was a spark in your words and worlds that nobody else had. I still think I could recite that story word for word. The world you said was like a ‘bad cake’, the one that you proudly showed off as a chimera of the things that you loved. It was messy and pure and beautiful in a way I still don’t think I really understand, even if I want to believe coming closer to it everyday.

I hated it. I’d be able to do it someday but someday wasn’t good enough when someone else was able to do it now. And, obviously, I had to be good in your way too. Because you were worse than me, and to be worse than worthless was unfathomable when I was supposed to be the one with the grades and scores and prospects and therefore the value.

So I pushed myself further. I started reading and writing stories, I forced myself to say I loved them until I began to. Even if I hated you, an unrequited rival, I was thankful for the passion you sparked within me. The passion that you know would become the catalyst for everything I would come to value past that point.

And it made everything else in my life seem hollow, but I thought it would all be back to normal if I engineered the best damn thing a high schooler’d written since Eragon. Ideally better, since Eragon wasn't really that good.

And I thought I did it, that I had made a masterpiece. It was empty, but so was everything else anyway. I didn’t know you were supposed to have pride in your work.

But the grammar was perfect, there were themes, and there were sensory details and there was poetic language. There was a coherent plot and reasonably peppered dialogue.

And, after all that, you had the gall to come up to me and say you admired how hard I worked.

And then you told me with a frown, the exact inverse of the smile that bit at my toes to keep me going, that it still didn’t sound like I was writing what I want.

I had been criticized. By you. And those words were all it took to make me realize that the work I had made lacked everything that a good story had, everything that made a good story good. Everything lead up to that realization, and everything would lead up to more in the coming years.

I cried that day. I asked why as my first message to nobody in particular, and, as would be the trend, I didn’t get an answer from them. It was so petty and meaningless but the things I felt, the shame and doubt, were all pushed over the edge in their own terrible ways.

And you know what I did next. I think you’re the only one who knew why I did it, too.

I asked you for help.

-

I don’t know why I put a line break there. It's probably your fault, I think you’re the one who infected me with a flair for the dramatic. You did it as we began to talk about writing, I asked you what I was missing and I dealt with it because I knew I would surpass you if I knew where to start.

You told me that you couldn’t give me advice for art that wasn’t criticism, and that the next steps would be up to me. The fact that I learned something from that hurt a lot, too.

Ironically, finally asking myself ‘why’ taught me more about art than anything I had tried up until that point. I asked myself why this was held to a higher standard in my eyes and those of others.

The answer I got from everyone I asked and from reality itself was that it was for me to decide. It was scary, but I think I began to get it then.

I bet you’d be laughing as you read this part. I know you’d know how dumb I felt when I figured out that I had nothing figured out, you're the one who gave me the words to tell you about it. Still, I wasn’t at a point where I could be vulnerable like that. I think I’m still not. So I’m saying it now.

But I started to feel dissatisfied as I spoke to you. Not with you, but with everything else. Asking ‘why’ seeped into every single part of my life.

Why do I need to go to school? Why do I care if I have a good job? Why should I have to attach my worth to what I can produce? Why is it so standard to do so? Why do I feel guilty when I question these things?

This line of questioning specifically guided me toward understanding some part of you. And your smiles stopped seeming so uneasy. They began to seem bright, a symbol of hope as I pushed beyond the gift of cognitive dissonance you gave to me.

It took a lot of repression and soul searching to come to terms with it, but on those first days where we talked about art and culture and passion, I think I fell in love.

Not with you. I know we didn’t have that connection, the circumstances of our friendship was too far away from that. But I fell in love with the world and people in general and I began to open myself up to them. I stopped allowing myself to exist in a shallow contentment and I began to look forward to things.

Thank you, once again. I think I'm thanking you so much now because I never got the chance when I could.

But, truly, you gave my world meaning and color. Or, I think, you gave me the ability to give my world meaning and color. You told me that that was up to me. So why? Why couldn’t I give you a new lens too? Was I too late?

I’m sorry, I’ll keep going.

We began writing together, talking and thinking and daydreaming with one another. We came up with characters we loved or used characters we loved and put them in places we loved. From tabletop games to collaborative writing to giving character to a fucking card game, we tried it all.

I remember all of those short days and long nights in the library, one of us ranting excitedly to the other, and the other taking notes to then reciprocate with their own impassioned monologue. The things we made still dot my memory and give me ideas and concepts that I so desperately want to share with you.

And we began to add more people to it as they gravitated toward us. Some came and went but it was always us at the core of it, driving it along. I know you always told me that every friendship was special, but I like to think that ours was a special kind of special.

You know this, but I don’t think you know that I began to like these stories more than my reality.

I fell in love with them and everything all over again each time. When I was with you, all of the uncertainty went away, I was in control, but not an authoritarian amount. I could control the future and past and present and so could someone else. And we made things better for it in these now forgotten pockets of reality.

My grades fell, as did my test scores, as did my prospects. I was destroying what I had been told was my life and I couldn't be happier.

Even if it wasn’t a healthy escape, I don't regret it because I could do it with you. I wish those days could have lasted forever.

And then it happened. You seemed fine the day earlier as we talked. Your writing was more spiteful, angrier, and more dispassionate at the same time. It was wallowing, but I just assumed you were developing a taste for grimdark. Maybe I should have been clued in by your absent headnods as I theorycrafted ways to make it effective satire.

I wasn't.

That Friday I got an email that someone had taken their own life. I remember the school making announcement after announcement about mental health services that I just didn’t care about. It meant I’d get an easy school day, and that was that.

I think I only started to look deeper when I was told to come to the principal’s office by a Dean with a sympathetic look on his face.

I wish you would’ve at least left a note.

-

I think it goes without saying that I cried a lot more that day than I did when you told me my writing was soulless. I felt betrayed, I thought that the one who gave me passion took it back, but I found my eyes the same. Even if you no longer saw meaning in anything, you had given me a lens to see it everywhere. Which I still think is a really shitty trade.

Your suicide reminded me of the pain and struggle of an artist. That we- I still don't feel worthy to be included in that- can do and say the things we do and say because we’ve seen the worst of them and we want to say something. Because the nature of expression means coming to terms with and embrace our darkest parts as we hope someone else can understand.

But even as you lost your will to keep going, even as you tried to escape a growing comfort zone, you never became cynical. You never blamed anyone else, and you always kept loving everyone but yourself. I know it’s stupid, but I find myself wondering if there was anything else I could have said to make you feel how you made me feel.

I find myself wondering if there were words that could have made you love yourself as much as we loved you. And, selfish as it is, that thought hurts more than having lost you. Knowing there may have been words I wasn’t smart enough to know that could have made it all better.

But I know you wouldn’t have wanted that.

Maybe the price of loving someone so much is how much you miss them when they’re gone, but I know I’d at least make that trade any day. I hope that, in the end, you were thinking about how much you would miss us as you fell.

It was only a few months later that I almost gave up. I couldn’t bear with the hole left in my heart and soul and the colors in my world. They weren’t taken, but knowing so much of what they were to me was missing made too much ring hollow. I began to hate the love I always felt because I felt alone. I wasn't. I think I get that now.

Every great and beautiful thing I saw left a chill in my mouth that seeped into my heart and blood and bones and skin and back into my reality.

But even as it all came to a head, I’m proud to say I didn’t give in to it.

I trust you enough to know that’s what you would’ve wanted, even if I can’t accept it sometimes.

But I have more time to figure out the fallout of trying and failing to go your route than I thought I would, because as I used some of our memories to kindle a bittersweet firelight hope and acceptance, something pulled me to anywhere but there.

I don’t know if anyone else came here too. But I did, and I’m writing you this letter from an enchanted forest next to a fire lit by the dragon who brought me through a storm of fire and ash.

I suppose you’d want to know about that dragon more than anything.

I remember that time you tried to put robot dragons into our cyberpunk world, and my concession eventually allowed it to spiral into high-tech fantasy. I remember the stories we wrote in that one, so utopian. That was early on, they were simple and hopeful.

Ah, fuck, I don’t know where I’m going with this. I don’t know what to make of him yet, I don’t know anything about dragon society outside of what one example has told me. But I still trust him, I told him a bit about you and me and everything that led up to the moments before I made it here.

He's saved my ass more than a few times. I'm not sure if I should try to figure him out or not, I don't know what's in my best interests. You wouldn't have an answer either, you'd just tell me to live it.

I think he trusts me too. I don’t know what happened, but he seems to be in the middle of a change right now. I wish I could tell him what you always told me in my own words, the line about kaleidoscopes. I’ll find the words someday.

He’s humanoid and, yes, very cute. I think he can partially shapeshift, considering I think I saw him grow claws once when trying to open up a shitty ration bar. It was funny until he just decided to squeeze the container so hard that it was forced out.

Which was terrifying. But it was also wonderful to see something so inhuman and otherworldly.

I wish I could’ve heard the stories you would have made for this world. I wish you could’ve seen the night sky here. It’s so much prettier than the disparate stars of our light-polluted town in ways you wouldn’t expect.

I’ll tell you about my stories when I have them. Even if you can’t tell them to me, I know this place has your sort of beauty. I hope that, even in the end, you didn’t lose the entirety of your quest for beauty in everything.

Because it would be unfair for you to recruit me and then just quit outright. And now, I wouldn’t even be able to slap some sense into you.

I know you didn’t, that’s something I don't see you losing, whatever happens.

So, for now, take my word for it; the night sky is very pretty.

-

It’s funny that by the time I get to a world like the one we so desperately tried to escape to, I finally no longer want to be there. Or, at least, it’s funny that I’m here alone.

And I hate it. I hate it so much.

I wish you were here to tell me it will all be ok like you never used to.

But there’s magic in this world. So I think things will be anyway since anything is possible. I hope you’re watching over me, I think things will get exciting and I know you'd want to see it.

And if I’m soulless, I hope that I kept some of yours with me.

Sincerely, Neptune Leaf.

Tears blurring my eyesight, I ripped out and crumpled up the pages I had written on. I scanned them once more, stained with wet splotches of ink and teardrops and inky teardrops, so many words crossed out and wasted.

I threw the paper gently into the crackling flame in front of me. I said a silent prayer in the flickering light, spoken in emotion and desire rather than mental words. I don’t think there are words that could describe that prayer. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to try.