Dear Oscar Wilde,

Honestly, I have been struggling for hours with thoughts about how to start this letter. It has been a long time since I have written to anyone—I have just checked, and it has been a year since my pen pal in England left me. I will not lie; I am pretty upset about it, and maybe I am still waiting for a letter that will not come. I could write again, of course, I could ask if he had forgotten me, but I will not. Maybe I am afraid of being left unanswered again, who knows? 

As for this letter I am writing to you, I have never done that before, never written a letter to a writer. Especially not to someone who lived a long time before me—over 100 years—and is now dead. I do not know how I should imagine you standing before me in the flesh or lying on the cold marble, probably worse than a portrait of Dorian Gray. Perhaps I should not at all. In the dead of night, looking out of my bedroom window at the dark sky, I should whisper what I have to say and hope it finds you. Yes, that would be more accurate and believable. Because although you are unfortunately dead, I do not know where you are. Maybe you are on a floor in Dante's inferno, wondering when your suffering will end, or maybe you are reincarnated in a different body and life or floating in an endless void, belonging nowhere. I wonder which would be a better option for you. 

You found the courage to illuminate the world with your sparkle and wisdom in the darkest moments of your life. Your creations transcended their period, and your name lives on to this day. Nonetheless, I must admit that it is not just your creative skill that captures my mind but also the depth of your agony and suffering. During your imprisonment, the furnace of sorrow and despair, you gave birth to one of your most touching and heart-wrenching works for me, De Profundis, in just a few months. You bared your soul in this letter, exposing the depths of your agony and the heights of your emancipation. As I read your words, I could not help feeling a kinship with you, for although I am only twenty-two years old, I, too, know the pain of heartache and the weight of regret. At least I think I do.

Throughout the book, I felt as if you were talking to someone who had turned his back on you, as if that person had become a wall; neither has a mouth nor tongue. It is so painful to talk to someone who will not understand you, to endeavor in the hope that they will understand, and to compromise yourself. I understand you very well, and I think, "In your case, one had either to give up to you or to give you up. There was no other alternative." is so agreeable to me. To devote oneself entirely to someone, to see only them, to know nothing else but them, although it may seem like love to some, is a very agonizing sight for one who observes from a distance. I am sure that at the time you are writing that letter, you have been looking back over the things you have done and blaming yourself. However, you are not one to blame; one often does not know what one is doing when one is in love or thinks is in love. Although I am not old enough, I sacrificed myself to someone in my past years when I considered myself very small, naive, and unaware of the world. However, just as you found yourself in prison due to your sacrifice, I found myself in hell. At that young age, I crawled into the most painful parts of Dante's inferno. But what did we do, sir, except to love? We both seem to have learned the hard way that it is not ourselves who are sacrificed but the other party. We have chosen to lose the other in order not to lose ourselves. Even though this is not the choice we want, we have been subjected to it. 

As I consider your life and efforts, I am struck by the parallels between your experiences and those of today. The battle for acceptance and the struggle against prejudice are ongoing fights in the hearts and minds of innumerable people. Being queer brought strife, a struggle for expression, and a difficult life in the era you honored, and while we have made progress since then, the challenges we must face to embrace ourselves and our love in purity still exist. Even though we lived with different people in different periods and loved different people, I feel like we are the same person because of our pain.

Your legacy reaches beyond mere prose into the hearts of those who choose to live with courage, to be free, inspired by your audacity. As I conclude this letter, dear sir, your unshakable spirit, which will never be hidden, fills my heart with profound gratitude for the legacy it has left. May your words echo forever in thinking and appreciating souls. Your poetic flame will never tire; your genius, dear sir, will never cease.

I can only hope that my simple efforts can someday add a little sparkling to the beautiful story of humanity that you have so beautifully crafted.

Sincerely,

A lost soul trying to make her way in this big world.