The Drestela Journal

Writing about wishes, hope, kindness and the things people find hard to say. New pieces from the people who built Drestela.

• What you are actually doing when you make a wish

  A wish is not a request sent somewhere. It is the moment a vague want becomes a sentence, which is a harder and more useful thing.

• The letter you write and do not send

  To the dead, to an ex, to a younger self, to somebody who would never understand it. Why people keep writing letters with no possible recipient.

• Planting trees you will not sit under

  Wishes aimed past the end of your own life: for children, for a future self, for a world you will not be around to see.

• Everyone needs somewhere to put the thing they cannot say

  Confession booths, diaries, therapy rooms, anonymous forums, the friend you call at one in the morning. What actually makes a place feel safe enough to say it in.

• Somewhere, a stranger is still thinking about you

  What it means to be held in someone's mind by a person who will never learn your name, and whose name you will never learn either.

• Nobody hopes for a mountain

  The hopes people actually hold are unremarkable ones, and that is not a failure of imagination. It is what hope looks like when it is being used.

• The wish that fits in one sentence

  A quiet morning. A knee that stops hurting. Eight hours of sleep. Small wishes are usually precise rather than modest, and occasionally they are something else.

• When the bad thing does not end

  Illness, caring, grief, unemployment, a year that will not finish. What happens to what a person wants when the difficulty goes on for years.

• The things you can only tell someone who does not know you

  Why people confess to taxi drivers and hairdressers, and why anonymity sometimes permits more honesty than being loved does.

• Wishing someone well when you do not want to

  The easy version costs nothing. The version that counts is aimed at the person who got the thing you wanted, and it is genuinely difficult.

• One line from a stranger, three days later

  You read a hundred and forget ninety-nine. Then one arrives at the wrong moment and follows you around for a week. On why certain ones lodge.

• The tree everyone ties ribbons to

  Cairns, love-lock bridges, roadside memorials, the wall people leave notes on. Why humans keep inventing a designated spot instead of just doing it anywhere.

• The bargains people make in hospital corridors

  Almost everyone has said something, alone and out loud, that they would never admit to saying. What that is, and why it does not require belief.

• Why we wish hardest at the edges of things

  New year, birthdays, the last day of a job, the night before. Wishing clusters around thresholds, and the reason is not superstition.

• People ask for much less than you would expect

  Given a free anonymous wish and no limits at all, almost nobody asks to be rich or famous. An impression, not a measurement, and worth thinking about either way.

• The ones that do not happen

  Some wishes simply fail, and no amount of reframing makes that alright. The case that making them was still worth doing has to start by admitting that.

• The relief of finding out you are not the only one

  Discovering someone else has felt exactly what you feel changes nothing about your situation, and helps anyway. Here is what it is actually doing.

• Carved initials and other letters to nobody in particular

  Marginalia, bench plaques, names cut into wet concrete. People have always left words for readers they will never meet, and the habit is older than any medium for it.

• Nobody tells you how quiet it is when you get it

  The thing you wanted arrives, and it does not arrive as a moment. It arrives as a Tuesday. Here is why that is not a failure on your part.

• One sentence is enough to care about someone

  You can know almost nothing about a person and still want things to go well for them. That should be stranger than it is.

• The same few things, over and over

  People do not wish for a wide variety of things. Spend any time with what strangers hope for and the same small set of wants keeps arriving in different clothes.

• Some wishes for a bad stretch

  A set of plain wishes for someone having a hard time, written without any promise that things get better.

• Why a well, of all places

  Of everywhere a person could leave a wish, we settled on a hole full of dark water. The reasons are less documented and more interesting than the tourist signs suggest.

• The ones that stay in your mouth

  Some wishes are never said, not because they are secret but because saying them would cost someone something. A look at what goes unspoken and why.

• Hope cannot be disappointed. Expectation can.

  Expectation is a claim about the future that the future can break. Hope is not a claim at all, and treating the two as the same thing causes a specific and avoidable kind of pain.

• Hope is something you do

  Hope is usually described as a feeling that arrives or fails to. It behaves much more like a direction you keep choosing, and that difference matters when the feeling is gone.

• Against the ripple

  Small kindnesses do not spread outward and change the world. What they do is smaller, more local, and worth considerably more than the story we tell about them.

• The wish that goes to someone else

  Wishing for a stranger costs nothing and returns nothing, which should make it the first thing anyone drops. People do it anyway.