A letter from Sep 2nd, 2021

Dear FutureMe, Hi, 23 year-old Abby! I can't believe you're so old. I feel older than I'm supposed to be now and I'm barely a legal adult. Right now I'm sitting in English 1102, three weeks deep into classes and just wondering about the future. I can't even imagine all of the things that will have changed in five years; so many things have changed in the last six months. Here are a few things I hope have changed, and some that I hope have stayed the same. I hope that by now you've gotten a few years under your belt as a nurse and are maybe even going back to school to be a nurse practitioner or maybe you changed your mind about nursing and have pursued a different career. As long as you're happy with your decision, then I'm happy for you too. Did you end up graduating from GCSU in three years like I had planned? Are you married yet? Or at least getting ready to be married or engaged?! Right now I really love Garrett. I can't picture myself loving anyone else. How does long distance turn out? Are we still together? I hope we are. I can really picture us having a long and healthy relationship and maybe even getting married one day (not to be dramatic and cringey). But I'm sure that sounds silly and naive to you coming from your 18-year-old self. If you aren't still together, well I don't really want to think about it too much, but i hope you're still on good terms because he really is such a great guy and I love him so much. Even though it might seem like it was something silly looking back on it in your twenties, it really was something real and so many years in the making, at least to an 18 year-old. If you're still with Garrett your five year anniversary should be coming up so send this part of the letter to him! I'm sure he'll enjoy it if he's grown to be half as sentimental as me (I hope that hasn't changed about you either). If you're not still with Garrett, send this to him anyway. Regardless of how the relationship ended, loving him played such a huge part in your adolescence and right now I can't imagine living without it. So if you aren't together anymore, i hope you've pulled yourself together again. You might be laughing at this right now, maybe you've been apart for 4 and a half years now and you can't believe you ever cared so much, but I'm an emotional person so sheesh cut me some slack, and I have absolutely no idea what the future holds from here on out. Another one of my biggest hopes for you is that you're still friends with Macy. Macy is the best friend you've ever had. I don't think I'll ever have another friendship like it, and right now I wish more than anything that her and Garrett were here with me at college. But I hope that regardless of the distance, your relationship doesn't suffer, and that even after graduation you make time for each other. If i could keep one friendship for the rest of my life, it would be this one. I hope that one day my kids will explain to their friends that "she's my aunt but not really my aunt just my mom's best friend" and that they can say the same thing about their cousins that aren't really their cousins. If you've fallen out of touch with Macy, call her up after finishing reading this. Also what ever happened with her and Jacob? Did she find a genius engineer husband at Georgia Tech like she wanted to? It seems to me now that adults don't really have friends because they're busy or other depressing stuff like that, but I hope you at least still have Macy and Garrett and a few other good ones that you'll make along the way. I also hope that you've stuck with journaling. It's such a cool thing, and i want to be able to show my kids one day. After you're done reading the letter, go back and look at the entry you made today and maybe peruse through some of the others too. Now's a pretty good time to take a trip down memory lane. Maybe try to start it up again if you've quit. It's therapeutic. How are your siblings? Is Grace married yet? Is she still with Gavin? I imagine she is. How about Libby? She's in a lot of trouble right now, but I'm assuming that's far in the past for her now and maybe now she even laughs about it now. What did she decide about college? She's old and grown now too, 21. That's scary to think about too. David's 18 now. Wow, that's crazy. The same age as me when I'm writing this. How has he enjoyed high school so far? I hope you have a solid relationship with him now that you're both adults and he's not a little kid anymore. I hope you have solid relationships with all your siblings and that you get together every once in a while, though I suppose we could all reasonably in different states by now. Call them up too, maybe get some lunch if you're close. I hope you still have a great relationship with mom and dad too. I love them more than anything because I know they'll always be there for me through anything and I'm sure you have way more reason to believe that than I do now. Where are you living now? Hopefully not still in Milledgeville haha. It's solid for college, but I don't want to be living there permanently. Maybe if you're still with Garrett you're in Atlanta and he's working on his masters. That would be pretty cool. Or a million other things could be going on and I could be anywhere in the world. Maybe I'm a travel nurse, though I doubt it because it never really sounded that appealing to me. Maybe you got a little stir crazy and moved to the city far away after being cooped up in Milledgeville for so long. You could be anywhere; I know that's part of the reason you wanted to do nursing in the first place. I'm hoping that this letter finds you at a good point in your life; that everything is going the way way you want it, and that you're genuinely happy and content. But I also understand that maybe you might not be at a high point at the moment, and that's okay too. If things aren't going so well for you right now, use this letter as a turning point, as motivation to find the root of the problem and fix it, and find help if you need it. That's okay too. Just know that no matter what, I am so proud of how far you've made it. I hope you have found meaning and direction in life and are living without regrets. I want to leave you with my favorite quote (also my senior quotes so I hope you haven't forgotten it). "May you live all the days of your life." from Jonathan Swift. I hope you really are living every single day and that you are proud of the memories you've made since you were a confused 18-year-old college freshman trying to find her place in the world. I love you. Sincerely, Abby (2021)