Dear You,

This letter I’m writing to you is to tell you to stop. Just stop. And think for a second before you say any berating words that will crush his soul. I can already feel them about to slip from your tongue with an evil hiss.

He can cry through both eyes and only see through one eye only. His other eye is artificial; created by a doctor when the boy was three years old and had been struggling with eye cancer for about a year. Through one eye, tears can still glisten, through the other tears gather in his eyes, only to become green residue in a matter of seconds.

Next year, he will be starting kindergarten.

I am saddened to think that one day his dull home will become the only place he will feel safe. That his parents are going to make him wear glasses everywhere he goes in fear that someone will maliciously try to get his eye out. Or even worse, that he’ll do it to himself because unfortunate circumstances can lead to self-destruction and childhood innocence does not last forever regardless of how much we wish it did. People believe that words can only do little. What they don’t realize is that words can serve as echoing gunshots to hearts and souls. People make others broken.


Even his nine-year-old sister can sense it, that one day her brother will look at himself in the mirror and say he doesn’t want to go to school. And I know that day his parents will still drag him there. And the moment I go pick him up, I’ll have his eye drops and a cloth ready to help me clean the residue dripping from his eyes. And I know for many days and nights he will continue to cry. He’ll give me that look, begging me to protect him, to return him to the days when life was all about green, because his favorite color is green. And he’ll make me watch Spongebob Squarepants again just so Spongebob’s laugh can drown out his solemn thoughts-- thoughts that were manufactured because of you.

That night he will lie in bed and will close one eye and try to see through the other. He won’t be able to see through his right eye and he’ll try to sleep it off like he’s been dreaming all along. He will try to convince himself that all along the colors and patterns of life have been seen by both his eyes. Yet, when he wakes up in the morning, he will do his personal vision test again and realize it wasn’t a dream, because dreams are for idiots. And that Mario and Luigi are going to be his only friends aside from his sister because school will be the place where his heart and soul will be broken, unless you stop.

Your maliciousness I can already sense coming through like a giant tsunami wave, ready to make this young boy drown in self-loathing. A loathing that is natural for all humans to feel except his loathing will be magnified and validated by you. Your own self-loathing, you will project onto him, as he will be the easiest target for you.

And I can already tell you that I will not stand for that because I will not let this young boy crumble because he matters to me.

People make others broken, but that does not mean he has to break.

Sincerely,
His Babysitter