A letter from Mar 24, 2025

Dear You, We’ve written so many letters in our life. Letters to friends who drifted away without goodbye, letters to people we admired from afar, letters to muses who appeared like shooting stars and disappeared just as quickly. But we’ve never written one for ourself. We have thought about it in fleeting moments, little sparks of intention that faded before we could catch them. But here I am now, finally sitting with myself, penning these words to the version of me I have not yet met. If you don’t remember, I’m writing this in class while not paying attention to our research methods professor. She is lovely, but her lessons are so painfully dull, and you and I both know you can learn all this on your own. I hope you passed this class. I hope you did well enough to laugh about this moment. But more than that, I hope you are doing well. By then, you’d have turned twenty-one on May 12. By then, you will finally be able to drink legally in America. I hope you went out and celebrated with your friends. I hope you let yourself get drunk and laugh until your stomach aches. I hope you are surrounded by friends who make you feel light and safe and loved. I also hope you had a summer job lined up, because you and I both know how quickly you lose sleep over money. By the time you read this, you will be standing at the edge of something big. Your last semester of college. The weight of it must feel both terrifying and electric. By now you will have begun the process of LSAT prep, law school applications, chasing after recommendation letters. I hope the fear has not swallowed you whole. I hope you remember why you are doing this. I hope you still believe you are worthy of every good thing the universe has yet to give. I hope you get that full-ride scholarship. I hope you step into that next chapter with your head held high, knowing you belong there. We have been in survival mode for far too long. From the middle of 2023 until the moment I’m writing this, it has felt like the world was conspiring to hold you down. But I hope that by the time you find these words, the heaviness has begun to lift. I hope the world feels wide and open again, full of possibility instead of fear. And now I need to talk about love. I know this part will ache a little, but you need to hear it. I hope by now you have let go of Aiden, the same way you let go of Reese, Ria, and Lui. Each of them taught you something important. Reese taught you that first love is meant to break and rebuild you, that you can still find your way back to someone and continue loving them (platonically ofc, Reese is our best friend!), and Ria showed you that even heartache and misunderstandings can blossom into friendship (we really owe her for saving us in Chicago). You still carry them both, not as lovers, but as tender reminders of who you once were. Lui on the othe hand was a wound disguised as passion, a selfish boy who only ever took from you and left you empty. But you survived him. You are forgetting him. Aiden is different. He was the first guy you loved. You gave him the deepest parts of yourself without hesitation. You crossed oceans and burned bridges for him. You came out to your hyper-religious family for him, peeled back layers of yourself you had kept hidden for years. You flew to a state you had never been to, just to feel his arms around you. And still, he left you. He left you not with kindness, but with silence. He made you feel small and disposable. He stranded you in a place that was never home, and then he blamed you for hurting. He twisted the story so he could be the victim, and he left you to carry the weight of his cowardice. But you must remember this: the love you gave him was real, and it was powerful. It was the kind of love most people spend their entire lives searching for. He could not hold it, not because you were too much, but because he was too little. Do not let his failure make you believe you are unworthy. You are capable of loving with a depth and purity that is rare and extraordinary. But you must give that love to someone who knows how to honor it, not someone who runs from it. And when you find yourself awake a night still wondering about what ifs, just remember that if we were too much for hi, he’s not enough for us. Letting go of him will hurt. It already has. But you have done it before. You will do it again. One day, you might think of him the way you think of Ria and Reese: fondly, distantly, without longing or you could just… not look back. He will become a memory, not a wound. And when that happens, you will have made space for someone who will not leave. Someone who will meet you in the middle and stay. You’re worth fighting for and I hope you know that. (Writing the end of this letter at our sociology of crime class rn and trying real hard not to cry). But until that day, love yourself first. Love yourself the way you have loved others: fully, patiently, and without conditions. You have always given your heart so freely. It’s time to turn that kindness inward. I am still learning how to love and understand you. But I hope, by the time you read this, you already know how to do that for yourself. I just wanted to check in with you, to remind you of where you came from and where you are going. We will rise above all of it. We always do. At the end of the day, it’s you and me. With all the love you have always deserved, You