A letter from Aug 23, 2023

Dear FutureMe, Happy ******* birthday! We are 29 today. Can you believe it? If you believe it, you made it to 32 *****. That was the age Taylor did a lot of cool things. I hope the world is in a better place. I hope the war is over and we went to visit Ukraine. I hope we can be there for people. I hope we got a chance to actually be fluent in a third language. I hope you have someone at your table, someone who doesn’t make you feel like you have to beg for a seat. At the time I’m writing to you, I’m working hard to restart your whole life. We lost pretty much everything: we have a dead end job, M. just left us, we got to leave the country we worked so hard to establish a balanced life in, we our mental health. I’m at rock bottom, to be honest. Deniz says I can only go up. I’m in her house right now, wearing a Birthday Girl tiara, waiting for A to give me a call just to have some company but with no expectations. I’m enough for myself. I have a loving environment of people who believe I can do it. I can start over. My head is spinning when I say it, or maybe it’s the dirt of baklava, kebab, Jägermeister and cigarettes. I don’t know girl. I feel so lost. I wish I had something to rely on, something more stable than myself, but I believe in you! I believe you will carry us to shore, like eventually we always do. I believe we got to see Taylor live, we got to go to some new countries (did you get to 40?) and I hope you fell in love, again. I hope you trusted someone, again. I know that for this 29 girls now it is scary af, but I wish that for you. I hope you’ll allow yourself to believe in another relationship. I hope you never stopped to believe in love. I hope you learnt to leave when things are not serving you anymore, but honestly I also hope we haven’t missed the chance to fight. We have always felt different you and I. We were the weird child, the wild teenager, the unstable young adult. We were fire, we were open waters, we were fertile grounds. We always wanted more to learn more, to experience more. We weren’t seeking to be book smart, we wanted to be life smart. To know people and culture with an open mind, to connect with so many human beings as possible. I hope you are enjoying this random ******* day we call a birthday. I hope you still wear a tiara on your head, and you feel pretty, and special. Let’s talk about health. I’m hope you are doing fine, but just in case this is not the case, I’m sorry. I’ve been treating our body like a bin, and for that I apologize. Our emotions get the best of us. Our life is so weird and complicated and so unfocused. I hope you learnt how to only focus on a few things that matter. But at the same time I hope your main focus in life is not a relationship. God I hope you’re independent, you’re cooking your own meals, you’re cleaning your house, you’re leaving the bed in the morning. We struggle so much with those things which seem so easy to most people. Life has never been easy for us. But we are still so excited to see what’s next. I love us for that. I love our childish attitude towards surprise. I hope you didn’t take your own life. I know the thought comes back once in a while. I know we never wanted to die: we just wanted to rest. So B. of the future, please rest. Please have some time to meditate and relax and chill. Please enjoy things, in the present. Please don’t be like me, stop looking at the past and the future all the time. Be there. For yourself, for the people who love you. For G., for Alina. Please don’t give up. This is our ongoing, never ending fight. But we made till here, let’s move forward. I love you, so very much. The idea of you makes me love myself more, in a time in which compassion for myself is all I have to start all over again. Please don’t be scared, you’re only human. I am proud of your story, every day.