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Description
The handwriting spills across the page. The ink is permanently marked on the paper, not to be erased by conventional pencil erasers. There are many pages, but they are seperated in one to two page increments. Each one is nestled in its own envelope, sent to me from various times in the past.

The writing that has spilt onto the pages and the envelopes is large and nearly illegible. I mistakenly showed someone this writing once. They laughed and said it looked like a five year old had written the words on the paper. In a way, she was right, but it was rude for her to point it out in such a way.

In fact, the man writing the letters is the same age I am, and I am no longer a child. I have proven my maturity to myself, if I haven't to everyone else. Yet, to read his letters to me would be assuming that he was still a child. The words are large and lopsided, and I could write three times as much as he does on one page.

The letters themselves, as I read them again, have an air of repeating the same thing, the same emotions which he struggles to put on paper.

Emotions are a gray concept. Social concepts are even grayer. If you read the news, especially the politics section, you would be inclined to believe that all issues and most things are black and white. But the opposite is true—very few things are black and white in this world. Emotions and social concepts are a huge gray area, and there is no black or white inside it.

Most of us are born with the ability to see these shades of gray and interpret them, understanding what they mean in the blink of an eye. We take this ability for granted, thinking that if we understand the gray areas, that must mean everyone else does, right?

If someone cannot see and interpret the gray areas of life (social skills, relationships, emotions), that must mean they are retarded. That must mean that they aren't like us. And if they aren't like us—if they aren't normal, then they don't belong around us.

Autism is not understanding these gray shades. Such a skill we take for granted is a daily struggle for others. This skill is something his mind cannot grasp. But he tries his hardest—he understands my love for writing, so he writes, making his best attempt in a medium he does not fully understand.

At the bottom of the scrawled, nearly illegible letters, he always writes his signature. His signature is, for all intents and purposes, neater than my own.