Between the Worlds: A Letter to a Fellow Traveller
You are right—though perhaps not in the way certainty usually demands.
I don’t live in your world, and you don’t live in mine.
The landscape of my mind is shaped by memories you’ve never shared, carved by sorrows you haven’t carried, and illuminated by joys uniquely my own. My world is built from private victories and silent struggles, from the books that altered my inner weather and the moments that broke me open just enough to let light in.
And you—you inhabit a universe just as vivid, just as real, yet entirely your own.
Here lies the beautiful, haunting truth of our existence:
We are all architects of invisible realms. We walk side by side, exchanging glances and pleasantries, while inhabiting different dimensions of meaning. You may look at the same mountain I see and witness, not stone and snow, but a summer with your grandfather. I may hear the same song as you and be pulled backwards into a decade, a room, a heartbreak you’ll never know.
Our worlds are not merely physical places. They are living interiors—maps of association, memory, and emotion.
And so, you may never fully see my world.
I may never fully enter yours.
We will misread each other’s symbols. We will stumble over emotional terrain whose rules were written long before we arrived. At times, we will mistake unfamiliarity for indifference, difference for distance, and silence for lack of care.
This is where things become difficult—and honest.
Because the danger is not that we live in different worlds.
The danger is pretending we don’t.
It is easier to flatten another person’s reality than to hold it with care. It’s easier to assume our map is the only map. It’s easier to dismiss what we can’t personally verify. History, relationships, and daily misunderstandings are littered with the wreckage of that refusal.
But what if separation is not a failure of connection, but its beginning?
What if the task is not to see identically but to honour the sanctity of another’s inner world? The bravest bridge we can build is not one that collapses difference, but one that allows a traveller from your universe to visit mine with curiosity—and for me to step into yours with humility.
We are, each of us, lonely planets in the same human cosmos. We spin with our own gravity, orbit private suns, shaped by forces no one else fully feels. We can’t occupy the same space. But we can send signals. We can transmit stories. We can learn to become careful astronomers of each other’s lives—reading the constellations of another’s pain and passion without claiming ownership of the sky.
So let us not fear that we live in different worlds.
Let us be awed by it.
Let us meet in the sacred space between realities—the quiet ground of I may not understand, but I am willing to witness. Of I may not have lived it, but I will honor its truth in you.
In the end, our solitary worlds do not isolate us.
They make every genuine moment of empathy—every act of careful listening across the divide—a small miracle of cosmic proportions.
You are the sovereign of your universe.
I am the keeper of mine.
And in the vast, shimmering space between us, we can choose what to build. Not walls. Not erasures.
But wonders.
