I used to go swimming often,
around the same time mulberries would start to ripen and colour the ground
beneath it. Dreaming up dragons and fanciful stories that I can’t remember. All
I recall is that deep feeling of serenity that came with floating on the
surface, warmed by the afternoon sun. It feels like a lifetime ago and the
things that are clearer to me, feel a lot less calm.
I am waiting for hindsight to be
less unforgiving, for a gracious light to be cast over things I can’t change
until the details blur and the edges soften. But the way memory works is
strange and cruel. It stains the way those mulberries stained your soft cotton
handkerchief when you were young. You have to wring your life out, between your
fists and soak it in cold water. You have to agitate it until the suds turn
colour and then you try to breathe again. A day or so in the sunshine, that’s all it
takes sometimes.
I’m expecting a letter soon.
An
email, to be more precise. I wrote it on some dreary June night at some point
in the last two years (I can’t remember when) but I’m expecting it to pop up in
my inbox soon. It’s a thing I do, you see, I send future versions of myself
emails** and pour my honest soul out when I feel conflicted and lost. When I
just need to tell myself something or tell someone and not feel like I am
burdening them with heavy pieces of my soul, unnecessarily.
And in the next week, I will get the first one. From a younger version
of me who was probably just reaching out and wanting to hold something that
only becomes tangible much later. I can’t remember what I said. Usually, these get tangled in the memories of
late night exam revision or buried beneath deeply stressful things that I bury
and move on from. I can’t even expect
the softened edges or the rosy haze because it would be a voice, clear and raw.
And she would have had a lot on her plate at the time. Messy circumstances and
a heart that did not know itself. I have these emailed lined up for years to
come. At my deepest valleys and on the peaks of my tallest mountains, they have
been quickly typed and sent to a random date and forgotten about.
They are markers along a path I
forgot I had taken. There are letters from the broken girl, the euphoric girl,
the girl in love and the girl dipped in hate, the girl who prayed and the girl
who could not remember to because she was terrified of the looming exam.
Letters
about the oceans that exist between my ribs and people who have drowned there. The oceans where I had sunk down into, trying to reason with myself and the tides that wore the jagged rocks down, eventually. The oceans where flotsam and jetsam of shipwrecked regret float. Those things tossed overboard in times of distress.
Letters about dying and then blooming again. Pleas to a future self to make
things right again. And: I did. I made some of it right. And that was
the point, wasn’t it? In writing those “I hope you love yourself deeply by the
time you read this”, it was the possibility that the version of myself who read
it would have those things I deeply wanted for myself at that dark moment. All
the questions and hypotheticals and fears I couldn’t quite address – they are
all monsters I have named now.
Whatever the letter says, I know
I made some of it right, eons before I fathomed it would be possible. Conquered
dragons I did not know the names of, but I know them now. I have wrung my
life out until the colour ran clear.
