my mind and soul and heart are ancient oceans

to the infinite versions of me,

i recently read a letter that i had written in 2020 to my 2021 year old self and boy oh boy. i’ve been terrified of doing this and reading it only made me realise how all of my worries about the (vast and crowded and terrifying) future started. it makes me nervous to think that what is a constant may not be when you read this, and i think i’m afraid that by writing about it as my whole life (which it is) i’ll simply be hurting myself in the future? but then i guess that’s just living too carefully and why shouldn’t i? I need to be more reckless.

this letter is a stream of consciousness about summer, growth, and naive dreams and wishes and conversations at nighttime that feel as soft as poems.

it’s summer, and it has been for a month already. I finished all my exams in may – exams that past me prayed I would be able to take, and look at me! we have been blighted by unbelievably hot sun, where midsummer really has felt like midsummer. i am busy every single day – at the reservoir, water fights in rivers, staying over at C’s with K and playing tennis, having picnics, sat on her bed until 3am talking about nothing in particular, conversations that I know we will look back on laughing, that feel like everything to us now but are simply small stars int he grand scheme of things. this is my last summer being a teenager but god, i realise this now. i feel nostalgia for the present moment because i know it is only fleeting. isn’t that so self destructive?

i am sat on C’s bed, T next to me sharing her duvet, K further along, talking with our heads tipped back and staring off into nothingness, and i am thinking: one day, this will be a memory, and i’ll be thinking back to when i was 19 and staying over in a big city and talking to my friends about love while we wait for our late dinner to be delivered. K is talking about her crush and wondering what he is thinking and why she has not had the pleasure of hugging him yet and wondering whether love really is meant for her (it is, and she does not realise that she is made of love). T is wishing he was in love without knowing what love really is, he aches for something that he cannot see, some ghost of what he watches other strangers experience. and I am thinking about ‘him’ and what a beautiful secret he is, the person I think of when I go quiet, how thinking of him feels like a love letter stashed away in the caverns of my mind and how he is the only person whose laughter I miss and whose character feels as soft as spring.

and then we will get a call and we will all run to meet the delivery guy and it is raining and each drop of rain is an angel and we are in our pyjamas with untied shoes, and our conversations will grow wings and float above our heads.

i have been thinking a lot about this notion of – you know – a year has passed and how much has happened, sort of thing. thinking about last year and where i was and what was consuming me and what i prayed for and all I want to do is to go back in time and tell her everything that happened because holy crap, she would be shellshocked. I can even imagine it – her looking at me, the same height, unsure what to do with her hands and long limbs, all big eyes and tears and that perfume I used to wear and my old jeans, staring at me; at me, now, with the eyeliner that makes my eyes look bigger, and burgundy lipstick that I now apply boldly, and a new pair of jeans that feel comfier to wear, and a signature scent that will define the next phase of my life. I am trying immensely to see the fun in that.
god knows that things did not work out how i wanted them to work out. jesus christ they did not. but does that really mean it turned out badly? that is what she does not understand.

I finished that perfume a while ago but smelling the bottle reminds me of walking with my old boyfriend everyday in the park. My jeans are folded up and stuffed into a packed wardrobe but I know that when I unfold them one day the pockets will be hoarding receipts and spare change from petrol station purchases I made with my friends one winter afternoon.

Being a teenager, seizing to be a teenager, grasping identity and change and life itself, is simply a continual, monotonous unraveling of a larger story that will be music to your ears in the future. There is at least a bit of pleasure in witnessing that.

this past month has been simultaneously lovely and terrifying. i’ve been so caught up in the idea of creating for the sake of creating, or harnessing every tiny little thought that i have, that at 4am i have to wake up to scribble down a thought in my journal. but more than that i’ve been writing in the dead of night, and praying to a god that I see echoes of in candles and dusty sunsets and sun-dried linen – words turning to dust in my sore throat, nightingales outside, prayers like poetry that i have memorised. forcing myself to sleep when the sky starts to turn lighter. the novel I am writing feels like a fantasy i would imagine as a child and I realise again that the younger version of myself, the one I tried to squash down and hide away, resurfaces when I least expect her to, and that is not something I can control, nor is it something that I should.

the thing about this letter is that i know i will look back on myself with a degree of embarrassment because i’ll have changed when i see it next. my word, i’ll be 20. i know nothing much will change but i also know myself so well that i could swear i’ll read this letter with an arched brow and small feeling of “Who did you think you were, silly girl?”. and maybe I am a silly girl. the years behind me stack up and crowd and fight for attention like a matryoshka doll. in one of the dolls I have cut my hair (I regretted that). in another I am stubborn and reckless and I do things without asking my parents (I regretted that too, and lay on their bed, crying). in the most recent one, I am reaching for something and waiting for it to reach back. my mind and soul and heart are ancient oceans.

so, in the next year i would like to:

• find more golden rings that don’t get ruined in the sea; swimming with them makes me feel like an alluring siren
  
• find a perfect trench coat; so perfect I’ll feel sad if I can’t wear it, with big pockets that hold all my ideas and regrets and dreams
  
• fall in love, with everything; I did not expect to fall in love in april and have myself pining for someone this summer. but i love it. i love thinking about him. he’s not the worst person to fall in love with at all.
  
• write, write often, write more, write stories, write bad poems, write bad songs, write essays, write anything that comes to mind.
  
• do your lecture readings please; learn learn learn.
  
• consume. consume poetry, chew on it, spit it out, swallow it, consume art, create your own, dwell on its impossibility and recklessness and tranquility and theories. bask in the brilliance of the human mind, in the uncertainty of past, present, and future.

yours sincerely,
M.

p.s. “I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.
I am begging: let me be lonely but not invisible.”

-natalie diaz