Letter to west coast ghost

i think of what could have been. i wish we were sharing ideas again. i had a vision for the future that can never be realized. i know that you have your own path, your own desires, but i made the mistake of believing they were identical to mine. i blame you to some degree. i’d be much further along if you stayed the course. life would look different for us both, but the winds took you west. i stayed east, forced to calculate the weight of my weaknesses alone. my talents, weightless, like they disobey gravity. they’re not free, just unbound, and that’s why they escape me.

you could rap better than me naturally. i imagine your talents have left our atmosphere by now the way you have forsaken them. you were supposed to sharpen me. many steps of the process have been harsh, teachable moments slowly leeching the joy from my only joy and for that i resent you and your absence. i’m unsatisfied with my growth because it feels incomplete in this moment. what felt like purpose now feels like a missed opportunity. but i cling to my growth and to what i can create because it’s the only way i’ve learned to continue forward, but truthfully, i feel abandoned, and i’m bitter.

with everything you’ve been through since you left, did you ever question your choices? did you ever doubt your impulses? did you consider what life would be like for me without you especially at that stage? at what point did you stop believing in yourself? did you ever? was there something i could have said or done differently? maybe i should have smoked with you. we never bonded over that. it never seemed like i had any influence over you, but you influenced me greatly. i am shadowed by an alternate reality where that influence never died, a realm in which your physical form isn’t so ghostly and our memories’ unread chapters do not remain so. For it isn’t only me who’ve you let down, but everyone listening to me who will never hear you.