The world comes from without, but love comes from within: A letter to my sister on her birthday

Tuesday 11/4/25

As it says.

Hello, sister of mine—

I wanted to send you something better than just the card also contained in this envelope for your birthday. Cards are weird to me. The idea of paying for someone else’s stock words to serve as a stand-in for my own.

It just doesn’t make a lot of sense from my point of view, and I end up reading these cards that make me think, “Wait, I don’t believe that” or something along those lines.

But I had something here that I think is quite special and would be better, all things considered.

It’s a story I worked on over several years, and I think it’s particularly apt as a birthday story. The story is called “Dot,” and it’s the second story in a book called There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, which you may have surmised from the title is all about girls and/or women.

I have to do a little disclaimer with this story, lest things get confusing. You’ll recognize names of people we’ve known, but none of the people in this story are any of those people.

This one was a bit different for me in that you could say it was inspired by people we’ve known. I don’t usually work that way in my fiction. But the title character isn’t our great aunt, that’s not our grandmother, I’m not the narrator, etc.

I’m unsure at the moment when I began this story. It wasn’t even a story at first. I was doing something else. Then someone made a remark to me that caused me to think of it differently, and I began again, doing it as something it wasn’t previously. And that took a while.

I called it done, time passed, and then last year I looked at it again, and saw I had much more to do, to change, so I did.

I guess you could say the story is about the passage of years and what we do for others and why.

In our current world, it seems that almost anything pertaining to the latter has a degree of “for show” to it, for attention, credit. Who we are often ends up being how we mold ourselves so that others will think what we wish them to think about us.

Which isn’t a great way to be. It’s not really being at all.

And with each passing year—and I’d say ever passing day—it becomes more incumbent upon us to truly be things. Be ourselves, and be someone who helps others for no other reason, no other motivating reason, than to help them.

The world comes from without, but love comes from within.

It’s a very funny story, and a beautiful and sad one, and one that I think is ultimately uplifting. Hard, too. Because of the hurt.

But perhaps more than anything, it’s a story about what’s a good way to be—at least regards what counts the most.

Happy birthday to you, sister.

Love,

Colin