Dear Courtney,
I am not sure if you are the person I'm meaning to write to, and let me preface this by telling you that if you're not, I apologize. Whether you are or not is of little importance in the end. Maybe it gets to Courtney and she's the right person, or maybe it ended up in your hands and you are.
What has brought me here is that I walked out of art class one day and saw something colorful in the trash, and being the sensible person I am I removed the colorful thing only to discover it was a discarded art project. A book open with folded pages, like the ones I saw hanging in the building side-by-side just a few days before. This particular one had red cover, gold insides, and the part of the title that I could see read Friends of Freelance. On the outside, you (or someone, I suppose) wrote the name "Courtney Osterhage." After looking the name up on the university's online directory, I discovered that the only student with the last name "Osterhage" is a Justin Osterhage. So I am sending this in hopes that you two are brother and sister, or husband and wife, or mutual friends who just happened to have the same unusual last name. Or at the very least you are connected enough to Courtney that if you happen not to be her you can pass this along, and it will someday get where it needs to go.
The reason I'm writing to her, and not to Justin or anyone else, is that on one page in her destroyed (improved?) book, she wrote the phrase "fuck this project." And that sort of attitude belongs to someone that I could tell certain things to that I couldn't to anyone else. The type of person that may be excited and curious to see a letter with their name on it with no return address. A person that would be interested enough to keep reading up to this point. I could trust that type of person. Now, I am not assuming I know you. It is a risk, sending this, something that contains things so important to them that could very well be ignored or passed over without examination or interest to anyone else.
I will never know if it got into the right hands or not, but I can hope. Because I am not a creepy person, or a stalker. Although I hardly think that stalkers think that they are stalkers, but I guess that's not something you really want to hear right now.
I can't remember the last time I wrote a Word document that wasn't double-spaced, and this seriously pisses me off.
Let me say that although the chances of your liking Michigan State are likely, as you live there, I must say that I hated it and am glad to not be returning. Although the whole existence of this letter may suggest otherwise.
I do have friends, but could not make even one here. So if you, like every other goddamn freshman in the world it seems, have managed to do better than I did or find yourself otherwise happy, I salute you.
We are living in a time and place where people don't get letters. When people get letters like this, chances are that they think it is a stalker or another type of crazy person. After all, why would someone write to a person they don't know and never have known and never will meet with no return address, no name, with nothing to say except their own boring and pointless problems and histories? There is something inexplicable about this type of person who understands why this would happen. It is me, and I'm beginning to think no one else.
Now is when I tell you the other things about me that I have started to put in the category "notable." I once drove from our Great Lakes state to Florida and back, in my father's car without his knowledge. For no reason other than to see where someone I love grew up. Turns out, he was long gone. This was the kind of trip that involved sleeping alone in fast food parking lots and spending all of my bat mitzvah money on gasoline, bought and recorded with receipts I still have today. I mention the money, because I suppose it should give you something of a reference of the trip's importance to a person. I should also mention that I could have not spent that money any more wisely than I did. I'll move on from the trip now, but I hope I will get far enough in the story where I can tell you how the trip fit into my life, or is it how my life fit into it?
I am the type of person that is attempting to become an accountant, and whatever assumption that comes to mind along with that sentence is fine.
I am the type of person that, although I have been told that it's illegal, puts spare change into the meters that have run out of time and the car is still lingering. I tell myself when angry jerks pass me doing eighty on the freeway, their wife could be having a baby right this second, and if they could apologize and gently explain the desperate circumstances they suddenly found themselves in, they would do so.
Lastly, I'm the type of person that is currently alone, and I suppose that is the most defining and important thing about me.
I am afraid I will never say one word to you. I fear too much, all at once, and then not at all at other times when I should. There is safety in writing. A safety that vanquishes the fear of saying something aloud.
This way, you can never encourage, question, doubt, hate.
This way I can't