A letter from February 6th, 2021

Dear Future Me! I won’t write a formal letter, hoping that you are well and okay. If you are still there, alive, breathing, working, fighting your way up, then I’m proud of you. I am proud of you for making it so far. For keep pushing forward, for staying alive against all odds, for doing whatever you could do to be where you are today. Even if nobody’s told you this in a very long time, just know that your younger self is proud of you, for surviving. She is looking up at you with so much hope in her small bright eyes, expecting you to come out of here alive. She might have been remorseful and even hateful towards you but she grew up. She knows all the harsh realities, she knows that you are doing a darn good job and don’t let anybody else tell you otherwise. Do not let them make you feel like a failure or loser because you are none of those things. You are a fighter, a survivor and a strong person. Currently, it is 3:32 am and I’m trying to complete my project work for the deadline tomorrow. My life is pretty much simple these days. I don’t have so many worries or responsibilities now. My friend circle keeps shrinking everyday and it doesn’t hurt as much as it used to do. I have been trying to keep to myself, to keep quiet, not to repeat those god awful mistakes. I’m still trying to find a way to forgive myself. I hope you have! I pray that you have found a way because it’s literally so hard to live this way. Like a heavy stone resting eternally on your chest and you can’t move it either because you won’t be able to live without it. This, right now is the tragic story of my life but I hope you have moved onto a less acute tragic story. I hope you are wiser now. I hope you have learned to implement the things you have experienced. I hope you are in a better place now. Do you remember writing the goals in your pw document 1? You wrote that you want to own a place that you can call your own? And Ma’am asked you why is having a place to call your own important? You wrote several poems, pondering over this question but never really got around to answer this. You asked yourself this question over and over and over again but could not seem to find the right answer. I hope that you know the answer now. I hope that you have a place to call your own. Now that I think about it, having my own place originates from my desire to be at a very homely place but without the horrors and nightmares of my home. Away from all that hurt and suffocation. I hope that you have found a way out of all that. I hope that you have managed to live on. We, you and I, are the blurry silhouettes of our collective desires and dreams. And I’m still trying to hold onto everything we dreamed in black and white. I want to warn you about the days you won’t feel like yourself, about the weeks when getting out of bed feels like the biggest struggle, like an enormous force is keeping you tied to the bed. I want to tell you that some days you will feel like a book with empty pages, poems with gibberish words, birds without feathers. You will feel all sorts of ugly emotions, you will feel flightless and undeserving of any kind of love and attention. But hey! Listen to me, you have to do it for us, for yourself. You have to stop getting out of bed like you are an oil spill. You are not a flat tire at 2:00 am so stop treating yourself like an unexpected accident. You are not an accident. You are the most unique person in a room. Like an apple on a pine tree. You come from a long line of swiss army pocket knives; women who are small, sharp and dangerous when not handled with care. Somedays I wish I could extend my arms 5,10 years forward and hug you tight and let you cry at my shoulder. I want to tell you that YOU are the main character of the movie of your own life, the movie I watch everytime I see the insides of my eyelids. Not to spoil the ending for you, but I want to warn you that your story starts very, very slow and you just have to be patient. Patient enough to wade through everything, through all the hurt and difficulties. But it does get better. So hold onto this, hold onto me. We are in this together and we’ll get out of it alive and victorious. Yours only,