A letter from Jun 1st, 2021

Howdy babe. It's you, from 5 years ago. It's 2021/06/01 at around 8:30pm, happy pride month. I hope you're doing well. This is what you're currently up to: - you ate some pasta with bacon bits in it. It was nice. Very starchy. Exactly what you need right now seeing as it's the start of winter. It's freezing! 7°C! About to freeze me bloody **** off. - you are in bed, you've just rewatched Monty Python's Life Of Brian. It's way more problematic than you remember. I'm talking WAY more problematic than you remember. Still funny though, but ****. Time and comedy age very quickly. - you have about 13 plush toys next to you, and they're all just waiting to be squished and cuddled. - You had a scroll through your Facebook memories and came across a picture from eight years ago. You were about fifteen, living in the flat. You remember that, right? You had your own bedroom, it used to get so cold in winter. The sliding door didn't touch the floor and let all the cold air in. Your room was a gloomy purple. You had these black curtains that just seemingly soaked up all the bad energy. You looked at that photo, taken during your emo phase. And you tried to look happy but it's obvious you were not. You remembered how much pain you were in back then. That photo is overwhelmingly sad, even though it's just a photo of you, you know? You also recognize how far you've come from that point. From the therapy, from the week in the psych ward, from moving, from your gran passing on, from your mum just upping and leaving, from facing eviction, abusive partners, loveless needy relationships with no care, from exes dying, from the abuse you recieved from people claiming to be your friend, from your struggle to find work, from the abuse you recieved from your mentor, from the failures you've had as a female tattoo artist, and from so much mental health struggles. My god, girl, you are kak strong. You've made a lot of mistakes, but you're eager to learn so much more from that. You're excited to fix your mistakes. You're excited to grow as a person, an artist, an online creator with a small audience and as a woman. I hope you're still creating- maybe even more than before? Currently your YouTube account has 74 subscribers. Your instagram has 323 followers and your TikTok has 527 followers with 19.5k likes. People really like your content on the tok. You do some comedy bits and the Dischem aunty impression, remember? "Next customer please at teller 4"? Did you do other stuff voice wise after this? I hope you did. Your business as a tattoo artist is growing very slowly. You recently had to deal with a very difficult client who wanted a phoenix tattoo on her side- but it's not just that, you did mess up the design as well. So you're dealing with that, and you are also thinking about fine tuning your skill again, by getting those silicone arms and feet and hands and stuff; and practising more on them. Either way, you're going to practise so hard until your own hands fall off. Do we still have the drive for creating beautiful pieces for beautiful people? Do we still tattoo these wonderful people? Do we maybe have our own studio or a room we're renting? I wish you could tell me, but I do like surprises after all. Jerri has been with Loutonn for 5 years now, and wow, they're such a beautiful couple. You can see the love radiate off of them from miles away. They have their ups and downs as every couple does; but the lord knows those two were made for one another. It makes you jealous sometimes, but you know Jerri and Loutonn's destiny and fate were supposed to intertwine early on. It's just gonna take a little longer for you. It has to feel natural after all. And with them, it's as natural as breathing and farting. Dad is single, he'd been on and off with this american broad for far too long; and it was messing with his mental health so badly. He had also built up so much hope that he'd be able to ship us all off to the states through her, but she's far too batty. But you know dad, he's mad about blondes. Earlier today we were at the mall and saw a blonde lady buying make up, dad stops us outside clicks and starts oogling at this poor woman. He exclaims "COOREE I NEED TO GET ONE OF THOSE, I NEED THAT TO COME HOME WITH ME!" Gotta love dad. As for you, you're still single. Shame. Nah but for real, you are "focusing on yourself and your business" or whatever excuse you can think of. We both know that what you mean is you're still recovering from a lot of trauma, and people just make you uncomfortable. But you're still very lonely sometimes. I'm not the romantic type but, have we met someone? Have we dated at all from this point? Do we at least have some friends other than our pets (chelsea, bruno, tori and jerri's cat smokey) and our stuffed animals? I want to type out so much more but... yeah. I just hope you're still creating. I hope you're still goth. I hope you're still trying and I hope you're still authentically you. I hope you're loving yourself harder too, babe. Keep shining, you rockstar. Formerly yours, Ché from 2021.