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

by Yiyun Li

“I always thought that the gifts he gave were a way of keeping people away…of focusing their attention on the persona he had created out of the raw materials of his best traits,”

People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain—that

Happiness and bleakness are not Orion and Scorpius, unable to occupy the same space in one’s emotional sky.