Dear Amanda

Dear Amanda, 

The rain pittered and pattered and tapped incessantly as it cascaded like a flooding river against the windshield of my car. Minuscule rivulets migrated across the road, distorting the lines and letting the wheels glide endlessly through the highway’s storm. The stereo was too loud as the bass ripped through the still air and the screaming vocals started a ringing in my ears. A pressure built from behind my forehead but never did I glance at the volume dial. I only stared out into the world. Blind and lost. 

It was neither the deafening song, nor the drowning rain thudding against the vehicle. It was not the flickering of oncoming car lights, nor the tough leather held in my constricting grip. 

Yet the thought of it all ending that made me feel so distant. The message left on that green piece of paper inside that white, blank envelope, stuffed into my bag on the back seat. The hammering of my heart as it sunk, drowning in the familiar emotion of loss. 

I have grieved the loss of friends, the loss of a pet and companion, the loss of a loved one so dear it never seems right to say they have truly left. My current grief, loneliness and despair may not be greater than times before – but never, never will it be less. I sat and drove and wondered what you had written. What final words you gave to me. What truth you chose to share as your parting ones. What lasting gift you gave that will accompany me no matter my path. 

The tears that burned behind my eyes may never have fallen, but the heavy, overwhelming weight that pulled at my heart and sucked the air from my lungs, that stole my voice and blinded my sight. All of it reminded me of what it was to be human. 

‘Why do we live?’ is a question, always asked yet never fully answered. A question sought in our philosophy classes, but only close to understanding within the words you sung. I hope you do not try to disagree because, in those moments, you really did sing to us. With the lyrics of a poet, author, playwright, and mother, you sang the lessons of life and love like they were gifts to share to the world. When you speak, it is like a lighthouse on the darkest nights. Where no star shone and the moon had fallen, you strung together words of wisdom that you shared unconditionally, towing us into the bay where we stand now with founded hope. 

I sat in your classroom, and for the first time in my schooling experience, I had to fight back the tears that begged to run free as you told tales of all nature. As you wept, I wept. As you laughed, I smiled. When you wished us the very best, I believed in why education remains the most important aspect of any child’s life. What I learned at my time in school was not only formulas and protocols. Not only how temperature affects rate and what Beauvoir thought of Freud. But how a mother loves a child. How our happiest days are the ones slipping through our unknowing fingers. How to understand the difference between the green-eyed monster and the distorted desires that always seem to fester. How to learn from the ones that write between pages, through the flow of ink, and are fixed into stories as old as time. How to find happiness in the smallest of details and always find the light within the grey, muggy and ill. 

Virginia Woolf, Mary Oliver, William Shakespeare, Tim Winton, Judith Wight, Sophocles, and the ever-amazing Laura Esquivel. Them and many, many more have given me lessons of life, and never would I have learnt – completely understood – if it were not for you. The complicated valleys of the heart and the drowning depths of what it truly means to live, all of it became a rose garden maze and backyard blowup pool in the hours spent with you over these years.  

I began with an empty inkwell and scratchy pen. My thoughts were tucked inside a tightly chained box and I had learnt to slam a door on any daydream that was too big to capture. Yet, you gave me a pen full of flowing ink, spilling out onto a page with wordless emotions and outrageous ideas. You gave me a key to the box filled with thoughts waiting to be strung together on a page instead of left bundled in the corners of a crate. You gave me a butterfly net to swing and reach for the dreams I had wistfully gazed at from behind the wooden door of my sanctuary.  

You have given me a new set of eyes to see the world. Not rose-tinted glasses or shaded sunnies that hide the horrors of our history and nature, but eyes of blue and green and hazel and brown. Eyes that know of the horrors of war and genocide, eyes of the lost and wondering, eyes of the hopeful and happy, eyes of the yearning. With the sight of my neighbours and people across the globe, I can see with an understanding and with my hand over my heart. I thank you for that.

‘All the very best’, you wish me within the soft curve of your script. Words that I carry in the back of my mind and in the centre of my heart. As you have given a voice to words sitting silently on a page, I will attempt to give a song to others in hopes of spreading the teachings you have so graciously bestowed upon me.

‘The Summer Day’ made my heart stammer and allowed a tear to escape the prison bars of my eye when you read it for the first and final time. Now, it is hung up on my bedroom wall, reminding me of where I have come from and to always wonder where I am to go next. It may be written by another, but always, I will see it as you. You have given it a voice and a melody to the lyrics on the page – a life to the lesson it describes through each letter, word, and silent space. 

I hope you understand the depths of this – of the emotions and appreciation I am trying to express. But for the first time, I know that no quantity of words and no quality of vocabulary will ever reach the bottomless well that is my gratitude. 

By now, all I can hope it that the picture I paint of a bold, red and gold slumbering lion – a being so warm, inviting and passionate, that gives so much but asks for so little –

can capture the sight that I hold for you.

In all my written pieces, I see you and how my words could touch your heart as yours have done mine. Sitting in that car, with bright beaming lights reflected in the rain shedding down in sheets of liquid, I became blinded by the overwhelming sorrow of never being your student again. All I can promise you is that I will try to reach others as you have reached me.

With all my love, 

Sam Williams