To the reader,

Thank you. In picking up this letter, you saved my life. You saved the lives of my two poor children, and you made purposeful the life of my recently drowned husband. How? Memory. You picked up the only piece of evidence that we care.

We know that people hate us, and we know that that’ll affect us until we all, all of us, pass away. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t care about what people think about us – we do, we sorely do. Every night, I can hear my young girl of only six years old silently weeping into her pillow. Every day, when I wake up in the morning, I know that there’s going to be a cracked window, a broken drainpipe, or smashed glass lying on the doorstep. I sneak out before the kids wake up and try and do everything I can to make it look like nothing’s happened, but I never can quite manage. The kids, they look up at me all the time: they know how I feel, and they’re saddened by it. But they’re only kids – they shouldn’t have to feel saddened by what’s happened to me. To us.  

Right now, as I write this letter, I know that my husband is at the bottom of some God-forbidden lake, people shouting, screaming madly over the water. I understand why they’re so mad at us – why they’re foaming at the mouths to bite into our flesh. But no-one understands how we feel. At least, they didn’t. Until you.

So, again, I say it: Thank you. In picking up this letter, you’ve completed my screwed-up life.

My children are weeping in bed now. Maybe that means they won’t hear me killing myself in every one of my thoughts. What did we ever do to deserve this kind of treatment? Why are we so hated?

We’re ‘different’.

Forever in your debt as I am, I can now only wish you good luck in conforming.

Yours sincerely,

A failed anonymous.