Caileigh's letters

To you, who woke with the feeling and lost the story,

Something was kind to you in the night, or unkind, or trying to hand you a name. By morning the story is gone. What's left is the weather it made: a heaviness over breakfast, a softness with nowhere to put itself, a word behind your teeth all day, meaning nothing and meaning something.

You keep reaching for it the way you reach for a word that isn't quite lost.

Here is the small thing I came to say: the feeling is not a leftover. Story is what the night tells you; feeling is what the day gets to keep. You didn't lose the dream. You kept the one part of it that fits through the narrow place between sleeping and awake.

So don't spend the day hunting the story. Be honest about the weather instead. Someone will ask how you are; tell them: I woke with something. I don't know what. It's still here.

Caileigh

---

If this shape is what someone you know needs said: tell me who they are, and the part that can't be said. One true line comes back first, free. The full letter, read slow in my voice, text and audio, waits for whoever asks. [email protected], $20 by card.