An Open Letter to My Sister

Nini,

I love you. Contrary to what a lot of my words and actions would lead people to believe, I love you a great deal. I do, though, find it very difficult to get along with you. I genuinely want to work on that, and as part of my effort to get along with you better, I here attempt to articulate my difficulty opening up to you.

I really value literature. You know that I like books, but it's really much deeper than that. You see, the Word became flesh, and it radically impacted written texts. The Creator of our amazing universe gave us language and texts as a form of communication. We both know this truth, but we have responded differently. I have devoted my life to search for deeper relationships between the textual worlds and the empirical one based on the understanding that when the Word became flesh and dwelled among us, the empirical world was forever changed. I strongly believe that texts are infused with power, and they ought to be used responsibly. They deserve respect, not abuse.

You once told me that you read to escape, and at that very moment I completely shut down emotionally and have not allowed myself to be emotionally vulnerable around you since (I'm not saying we haven't fought since - I have just been emotionally disengaged from all communication with you) because I consider reading as an escape to be such a horrendous abuse of a text. You are using a text to disengage with your life rather than respecting it as something capable of enhancing your ontological reality.

Now, as I'm sure you were quick to notice, my disengagement from you, an actual ontological person, is no better than your treatment of textual worlds. I admit my sin, and I ask your forgiveness. I won't even ask you to read any differently. All I ask of you is that you understand that when you disregard textual reality, it's a personal wound to me. You see, sometimes I feel like Mali, the gardener of the Sea of Stories. In Rushdie's tale, Mali's sole purpose is to care for all of the stories in the ocean. I feel a responsibility to care for texts, and when someone pollutes the ocean which I care for, and which also sustains me, I get sick.

I can't know for sure if telling you this will actually help you understand me any more, but I'm making an effort to remove any road blocks I have put up to prevent you from knowing me. For example, hiding the fact that I have a blog from you for over a year (and still hiding it from most of our family - again, I can't keep you from blabbing, but I ask you respect my wishes right now) kept a lot of who I am from you. My writing makes me feel incredibly vulnerable, and I have hidden it from some of the people I love the most because they are capable of hurting me the most deeply. You are capable of hurting me most deeply, Nini.

I know that there are many careless readers on the internet capable of stumbling upon my writing and abusing my text with only a surface reading, but I cannot think of a single human being who would wound me more by doing that than you, Nini.

And so, I hope, begins a dialogue.