A Letter to Whoever Is Down Here

Dear you,

I don’t know your name, or what brought you here, or what time it is where you are. I’m writing from the bottom of the map — forty metres, the lowest point on this route — and I’m assuming that if you’ve found this letter, you might be somewhere low too.

So, first: hello. I’m glad you’re reading this. I mean that plainly.

I won’t tell you it gets better. You’ve heard it, and on some nights that sentence bounces off you like rain off a window. I’ll tell you something smaller instead: the low place is a place, not a conclusion. It’s where you are, not what you are. It has edges, even when you can’t see them from inside.

Here are some things that are true down here, at least for me:

• Everything takes longer. That isn’t laziness. It’s gradient.
• The voice that says nobody would notice is very confident and very often wrong. It’s a weather report from inside the fog, and fog is famous for getting distances wrong.
• Small things count double. A glass of water. Clean socks. Reading one paragraph of a letter from a stranger.
• You’re allowed to stop climbing for a while. Resting on a slope is not the same as sliding down it.

If your thoughts have started to drift towards not wanting to be alive — even quietly, even “just thinking” — please don’t keep that alone down here. Tell one person. If there isn’t anyone tonight, a helpline is a person too: they answer at three in the morning precisely so that three in the morning has someone in it. The numbers are on the lantern page. You don’t need to be “bad enough” to call. You only need to be someone who’d like a voice for a while.

And if you’re not there — if you’re just tired, just grey, just low — that’s real too, and it deserves care too. You don’t have to earn rest by suffering more.

I’ll leave this letter here at the bottom, under a stone. Someone else will come along later and read it. Maybe that will be you again, on a different night. If so: you came back up last time. The map remembers, even when you don’t.

With you, from forty metres,
— a fellow walker

P.S. The path from here climbs in switchbacks. At every turn it will look like it's heading the wrong way. It isn't.