A letter from Sep 16th, 2021

David, Happy 25th birthday from a little over four years in the past. Right now, it is 22:56 on a wet, warm Brooklyn night. Today is a Thursday. The window is cracked a little, the box fan off, and the chirping and muttering of all the various creatures outside seem clear as day. We're on our second can of Rockstar Pure Zero out of three cans we managed to snatch from the Dollar Tree tonight—naively thinking we'd make them stretch through the weekend. We're not feeling too good in our brain, but that's okay. We'll make it work. You've reached a quarter of a century old. How does that feel? Good, surely. A relief. With each year that passes there is yet more distance between us and the past we try so hard not to define ourself with, and I'd say so far it's working well for us. We're coming so heavily into our own even in 2021. I can't imagine how it is by 2026. So far in 2021, we've moved closer to our friends, gotten our own apartment, and we've never felt safer. The people here are kind and loving. We work in a school where the kids are intelligent, eager, and truly hilarious. Right now, we're bouncing acceptances to graduate programs for library science and secondary English teaching, respectively, on our knees, debating whether we should accept either one, wondering what our life will be like a year, two years, five from now. You remember how it feels, I'm sure. It's probably something you still struggle with. Or maybe not—the Future Fog. The type you wouldn't see your own hand through if it were a foot from your metaphorical eyeballs. We've always struggled to imagine ourself in the future tense for obvious reasons. We gave up trying to do that anyway a long time ago, or at least in any real sense. We can take guesses, that maybe you in 2026 are a middle school English teacher still living in Brooklyn with your own studio apartment, still living it up with our group chat friends we love so dearly, or maybe a library assistant off in some small city we as of 2021 don't know or care about quite yet but will come to love given the right amount of time, or maybe you're a small-time writer tucked away quietly in Winona, working nights at the Sarnia Street Kwik Trip to make ends meet. (Were we right, or were we completely off the mark?) We can also toss our hopes out there, ours now being that you in 2026 are at home in your own skin and your own life in the way you've always wanted to be, that you're content with the way your life has gone so far, and that you've done great things with your writing, even if that means finishing a piece you alone have gotten to cherish. (I for one hope you are still alive. Please let me know.) But somewhere along the line we reached a point where we stopped setting our future in stone before it ever even happened. There is beauty in that, I think. And sense. This way, we're not limiting ourselves in what we can do. Chances are, you will and likely have already crafted a future worth living, in whatever form that may take. I trust us to have done that. I mean, we're already doing that right now, right here in 2021. Even in the middle of a pandemic, even in the midst of all these other things that should have cut us off at the knees, we're still kicking. We're putting together a totally amazing, totally unexpected life. I'm proud of us for that, and I'm proud of you in 2026, no matter where you've ended up. xo, David