A letter from January 3rd, 2021

Dear FutureMe, i'm writing because for some reason i'm very, very terrified of the future right now and i don't know how to make myself stop being very, very terrified of it. there's all this stuff about how the polar ice will melt (the earth will get so hot that no one will be able to live in australia anymore, which made me want to cry when i heard that) and of course the vaccine doesn't actually work so the pandemic will never end, it'll just go on and on and on and i recently read "Just Kids" by Patti Smith, which is about her and Robert Mapplethorpe's life together when they were young and full of dreams in the 60s and 70s. i love that book to ***** and back, but it made me so **** sad that i'll never get to live in a world like that. in a world where people lived their lives in the place they actually were instead of on youtube or whatever else. it was a world where people still took time to think and feel things, when there was good, raw music that meant something and people weren't afraid of letting their kids bike to school and it didn't cost so much to live. it feels like it costs a lot of live now, it costs a lot of money and it costs a lot of tiredness and feeling like giving up and just being sick of all the aching for what might happen and what will definitely never happen again, because once january 3rd is over it will never come back and you'll never ******* have it again, not ever. once you turn seventeen, you'll never be sixteen again, you'll never think like you did when you were that priceless, wild age, and you'll never be able to get your old feelings back, they'll be locked away as memories until they fall into the pit of your longterm and you just forget them like you forget everything. whenever i'm trying to fall asleep, or maybe when i'm staring out the car window, i have these thoughts that are my worst thoughts ever, and they're things about horrible stuff i've done, like ignoring isabella for no reason other than i was scared, and stuff like that when i'm thirty i won't care about my freshman and sophmore years of highschool anymore. that one day in the bleak, empty future that no one really wants, i won't remember what annabelle's laugh sounded like (bubbly and young and sweet) and how it was different from lexie's laugh and kaleb's laugh (hers soft; his sort of like hiccups, but i love him for it anyway), and that ALSO makes me wanna cry, it makes me wanna cry until my god**** eyeballs fall out of my face, because those laughs are very nearly the only real thing i care about. the only real things i care about are far away from me now, thousands of miles and months away, and i can't see them anymore. i don't know what to do, and i can't cry, anyway, because for some reason i can't cry quietly. whenever i cry, it always ends up loud, and if i cry loudly then mami will think she needs to take me to a therapist, which she kind of already does think. last week i watched some of the tinkerbell movies, which i loved more than oxygen when i was little, and abby and i had all the little fairy figurines and we'd pretend we were tink and silvermist whenever we played in the backyard at her old house (i miss that old house, and the fact that i'll never see that backyard again, with the dandelions, is just another heavy, insomniac thought). watching those movies made me feel better while i was watching them, but once they were over i felt awful again. the ends of movies always make me feel awful, the ending part, the closedness, i guess. like a world just died. or maybe the realization that it isn't real, and so nothing more can ever happen to those fictional people after the screen has gone black. i keep having this thought that my life won't be a life at all, it'll just be a stupid simulation, it'll just be waiting and waiting but never the reaching moment, and none of us will ever step up to the plate and take responsibilty or try to fix what needs to be fixed. and maybe fixing it is impossible at this point, but we have to at least try. trying is better than not trying. but trying hurts when it's pointless, when it seems like the only thing you'll get from it is feeling like **** when you fail at saving your unborn children's dreams. i hope you're okay and stuff. i know you can't write me back to tell me if you are, but i'll just have to live with that until i am you. it'll probably be alright. love, vivi