Dear Kendra,
[Readers, before you go scouring the interwebz on a quest to find this Kendra of which I speak, relax. She doesn't exist on the internet. She exists only in the minds of me, S, and our other friend whom neither of us really speaks to anymore, M*****. She was a character in a book S and I spent most of 8th grade coming up with the storyline for.]
You were just a baby. The daughter of a mermaid and a sorcerer, you had powers the likes of which your world had never seen. A blank slate, you weren't inherently good or evil; you would end the battle once and for all, but whose side you were on depended on how you were raised. And so, under the cover of night, evil stole you from good's protected castle and whisked you away to a fortress dug deep inside a mountain in a long-forgotten range. A team of students was assembled to rescue you. They never made it.
I loved you so much. You and everything you stood for. Looking back now at how obsessed we were with you, your protectors/defenders, and the forces of evil who held you captive, I have to laugh. But it was all so real then. Your entire world was the greatest figment my imagination will ever know. Your parents' parents, we were the masterminds behind both the plot to steal you and the quest to get you back. We made every minor success and major pitfall along the way. The unexpected detours that threatened to be your would-be saviors' undoing were our doing. We spent hours on the phone and in the library with this every day, planning the most minute of details. Children in our world, we were the ultimate masters in yours. If the guy who wrote Eragon could do it when he was a young teenager, why couldn't we? [Oh how I miss the days when 'Why not?' was reason enough to do something. Though I suppose there's no reason it can't still be.]
Your story never ended though. Sometime around the beginning of high school I simply lost interest. I looked at the unfinished 68 page outline [yes we were that serious] and couldn't believe how naive we were. I had this cold hard world moment where I didn't think anyone else would ever take us or our story seriously and I gave up on you. And I hated myself for it, so I tried to make up some ridiculous story about how writing the outline was boring me and I wanted to spend some time writing actual chapters, but no matter how hard I tried to dedicate myself, I couldn't give you the attention and love and respect you deserved. I just wasn't into it anymore. Maybe it stemmed from not being as close to S once I wasn't seeing him every day, maybe my life just got in the way, maybe I just grew up...I told him I didn't like what I was writing and that I needed to pick up some better writing skills before I could keep going. That I was going to develop them in the Creative Writing class I was going to take sophomore year and then I would start back up again. I took the class...but I never started up again.
I lost all interest in fantasy [at least, the magic and dragons and quests kind of fantasy] at the same time that I gave up on you. I couldn't bring myself to have anything to do with the genre. I don't know which loss of feeling came first. It was so bad that I could barely even finish the last Harry Potter book--I had to know what happened, but I wanted nothing to do with wands and wizardry anymore. I couldn't. I don't know why, but I just couldn't. I couldn't take it seriously anymore.
I'm sorry. I wish I had done better by you. And now you're gone, extant only in our memories, because my mom threw away the computer everything that related to you was stored on without asking me if there was anything I needed on it. I just came back from Princeton one break and it was gone. You were gone. So I'm sorry I couldn't do right by you. And S, I'm sorry I couldn't tell you the truth. I couldn't explain it then, and I still can't. Something in me disappeared and took you with it, Kendra. That's all I can say.
Maya
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