A letter from April 17th, 2023

Dear FutureMe, I hope you’re doing better in your today than I am in my today. It’s not been a particularly bad day by any means, but I still hope yours is better. What’s hard about today is that I’ve picked up a case of wanderlust. I want to travel. I want to take that train across Alaska. See that beach that’s pink, or the one with tiny star fossils, or some phosphorescent plankton. The Northern Lights, maybe. Definitely go scuba diving. I’m so jealous of Maria taking a cross country van trip this summer. I’m so tired of not being able to make plans, real plans, with a date and a budget and everything. I’m so so lucky. If it weren’t for the love of my family, I’d be homeless. Dead by now, most likely. I simply could not provide for myself on my own. As it is, I have a beautiful home, people who love me, people who will cook for me and clean up after me and wash my hair when I can’t. I have so so much. And I’m greedy for more. Wellie, Josie, and I made up a word the other day. CHAPÓUFUL /sha POE ful/ (adjective) - a feeling that contains the same kind of emptiness as “hungry” and “lonely”, but for fulfillment in life instead Coming up with the word was harder than you would think, but it made me laugh, like all conversations with those two do. For a moment, at least, the feeling of chapóuful faded into the background like a wolf slinking from a fire. So, today I’m grateful and I’m angry, and I’m loved and I’m lonely, and most of all I’m restless. My soul wants to do all the things my body simply can’t. Every day I’m hungry for the one and only thing I don’t have. You’d think I’d have learned by now how to be satisfied with the small, safe life I’m allowed. I have enough. Actually, I have plenty. But the worst thing I have is hope. That’s what keeps me from satisfaction. If I knew I could never get better, I could grieve once and for all and accept my lot. But I don’t know that I can’t, and so I hope and I seek treatment and I WORK at it, goddammit, and I am crushed by disappointment over and over and then over again. So this is me. Aching with chapóuful. Aching everywhere, inside and out. Achingly yours, Me