I truly believe that the greatest gift that you can give to another person is to genuinely let them know that who they are and what they do matters. It has been my goal in 2014 to become a more thoughtful person. A string of deaths to some individuals who positively affected my life led me to conceive this series. As the words to my favorite song go, “And for those who have stood by my side, you are the story I tell.” You are the words and pages to my story.
Over the course of the next several months, I will be writing open letters to those who have positively impacted my story. I’m not going to lie. It is my goal to make you cry, not out of grief or pain but out of the realization that you do truly matter. I am not doing this in order of how important you are to me. For the most part (other than birthdays or other important events), the letters will be done in a random order. I hope you enjoy, and I hope you come away from this with the realization that you are extremely important to me.
Dear Becky and Rachel,
You were much better to me than I ever deserved. That’s never gone unnoticed or unappreciated. I could leave it at that, but that wouldn’t be enough.
When I look back at my early adolescent years, I was pretty much the most awkward person alive. I guess to some extent we all are awkward during that age, as we’re trying to find ourselves and our place in the world. That said, the world is not particularly kind to those who are particularly awkward and lack confidence. You two both (at different points) had every reason in the world to respond unfavorably to my awkward behavior and scar me for life, but you didn’t. You could’ve taken my already fragile psyche and smashed it into several billion pieces. It would have been a natural response, and some might argue that it would have been warranted. That’s not the type of person either of you were or are, though.
Becky, you were my first real crush. The only reason I ever started coming to Palos in the first place was because the Kujawas wanted to set me up with you. After the first week I went there, I realized that you were even more amazing of a person than they hyped you up to be. As more time went on, the more I realized that your personality was just as wonderful as your appearance.
Of course, I was awkward and couldn’t go about things like a normal person, so things predictably started to not go so well. I got the “genius” idea to call your house and hang up about a billion times. I still don’t exactly know what I was looking to accomplish by doing that. I’m glad we can all laugh about it today, but it was probably the creepiest thing I ever did. Needless to say, things didn’t work out romantically between us. However, you never treated me like the creep I had been acting like. You treated me like a friend.
Rachel, you had the misfortune of being my second crush. Despite what you probably thought, I liked you because you were Rachel, not because you were Becky’s little sister. I never saw you as any sort of consolation prize. Of course, normal people would know better than to move on to the sister of someone they were interested in, but I’ve never claimed to be normal! We never really got on the right foot that way, and subsequently our friendship took a long time to develop. That’s my fault entirely. You never really got to see the best of me.
After a while, I stopped going to Palos for a number of reasons, but a funny thing happened. You two moved to Virginia. I could’ve just chalked up my experiences with you as lessons learned in “How Not to Act with Girls, Ever”, but I’m not exactly the person who likes to just let things go. I realized that there two perfectly good friendships that I could salvage. Fortunately, both of you were open to developing those friendships as well, in spite of the distance. I became better friends with both of you. The older I got, the more confident I became, and we were able to cultivate better friendships than we ever did when we saw each other on a regular basis.
Rachel, I’ll never forget the time we went to Starbucks when you were back in town in late-2008. It was such a big deal to me that I was hanging out with Rachel Jackson, the girl I couldn’t muster up the words to talk to when I was in high school. It showed me how far I had come as a person. We had a nice time, and it was great to actually spend some time together as friends.
Though our correspondences have lessened over the years as our careers and lives (and your marriages) have taken most of our time, I am still thankful for our friendship and the conversations we do have. You two grew from amazing girls to amazing women and wives. I still love your family and miss your parents, even though it has been a great number of years since I’ve seen them. If I saw them again, I’d thank them for raising such great young women. I’m proud of the people you always have been, and I’m so thankful that you treated an awkward kid so much better than he deserved.
Love always,
Jakob
P.S. Happy Birthday, Rachel. It’s crazy that we’ve known each other for over half our lives now.
No comments:
Post a Comment