In a decade, you will find yourself unable to fall asleep, having just turned twenty-eight. You’re still young, and you know that, but the number will seem big. Nearly a third of your life, even if you live as long as your great-grandma did. As you toss and turn, the decade beween eighteen and twenty-eight will roll around in your head. It will grow larger and larger, snowballing into something intangibly huge. You’ll remember how, a decade before that when you were only eight, your lifelong dream and desire was to be sixteen. Sixteen, like Kelly Kapowski in Saved By The Bell, because when you were eight, sixteen seemed like the distant future. At eight you believed that sixteen was when you’d reach some life peak, and you’d be driving around in some cute car with a cute boy wearing cute clothes, and that all of that cute was life at its best. You’ll be a little embarrassed by how silly you must have sounded when you told everyone at Concord Academy about this childish fantasy in your senior chapel that you gave only months away from your 18th birthday. High school was very different from what your younger self envisioned, and at eighteen, you feel like you are wise beyond your years. Oh how you, eighteen-year-old me, thought eight-year-old me was so sweet and naive.
Oh, eighteen-year-old me, you’re still so sweet and naive.
Continue reading “A letter to eighteen-year-old me, on her birthday”
