A letter from Nov 10th, 2021

Dear Future Me, It is November. The anniversary of the date that changed everything is approaching again. 4 years. Somehow time moves so quickly and stands completely still all at once. The season will be heavy with heartache and memories of the beginning of what would be the complete undoing of you as you always knew you to be. Mere days are left before the great divide. The before and the after. You don’t recognize yourself in pictures from before anymore. The you before you were shattered. And now you find yourself haphazardly glued back together only with cracks and holes from pieces that couldn’t be found, or pieces that you couldn’t bear to carry - that you had to set free to survive. Other pieces were decimated - never to be recovered or reconstructed at all. Sometimes, not often, but more than before, light finds the cracks and shines in, but mostly they just seep darkness out. You still feel so so broken, but also like you can’t really keep holding onto the brokenness. You get the sense you should have found a way to patch up the cracks by now. So you mostly hide them and hope that no one notices you haven’t actually put yourself back together yet. You still don’t truly believe that it will be possible to put yourself back together at all. You - I - hope that I am wrong, and that you’ve found just the right thing to patch yourself up with. Or maybe you don’t need a patch at all… maybe you won’t long for before anymore… maybe you won’t break with the familiar sting of your heart shattering with every cresting memory. Maybe the memories won’t be trapped inside of you anymore at all… That endless ocean rising and receding within you, but landlocked nonetheless. Maybe the memories will flow through instead. I hope you’ve learned to let go. Truly. And to define yourself in an entirely new way. No more before. No more after. Just new and you whoever you are now. I hope that you don’t recognize ME in photos anymore… I hope that you are bright and shiny and new. But not new in that vulnerable unbroken way. New in that golden glow of an impenetrable healed soul way instead. I hope that you look older now from years of smiling and laughing and feeling all of life. I hope that the weight of your shattered soul isn’t so heavy anymore. I hope you are free. Me. Free.