Hey there stranger,

I truly, honestly hope you’re doing good. I haven’t thought of you in a long time and I hope you grew up from when I last saw you (and from where we both started we both had a lot of work to do). Lately, my dear acquaintance, you’ve been on my mind.

I wonder if you ever think about me if you ever feel sorry for making me cry when they brought us in for those peer intervention crisis things. You made me angry, you made school a living hell and I ran out of excuses to tell my parents in order to stay home. I look back at the journals that I wrote back then and every thought I wrote down is what you did to me that day. The torment you reigned on the playground seemed to consume myself day in and day out.

Sometimes I scroll through Instagram and I see a picture of you. You were posing with your boyfriend before the two of you went to prom and you had the largest smile on your face. You looked gorgeous in your dress and from what I saw, you had the night of your life. I hope you can tell my honesty when I say truly, I’m glad you’re happy.

Because when you were gone, I became happy too. For once, I felt like I could become as beautiful as everyone thought you were. The first few months away from you I realized I wasn’t the person you thought of me to be. I was weird, but there was no possible way that I could be categorized and shrunken down and compacted into what you called me: freak.

As my close friends would say now: “You’re weird, but you’re weird in the fun way.”

From you, I had learned that I can never get rid of the personality I have been given that you were off-put by. It is me, it is a fireball of a personality that I have been given. Now I won’t let anyone change it.

Ever.

Signed,

Adeline