Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

by Yiyun Li

Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

For years I have been hiding behind that: being addicted to fatalism can make one look calm, capable, even happy.

But an agitated mind does not know any road to peace except the one away from home, which time and again exposes one to that lifelong phobia of attachment, just as to write betrays one’s instinct to curl up and hide.

Waiting is treacherous. Rather than destroying one with the clean stroke of catastrophe, it erodes the foundation of hope.

For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.

The difficult moment is not when one gives up—giving up, in fact, brings certainty; relief and peace, too—but afterward, when the same pattern repeats itself.