I’ve always wondered about the purpose of writing letters to a past version of ourselves. What would I say to the shadow of my history, to an unlived me? A retrospective to carry back to yourself, reflections of growth or lessons of revelation, the unmaking of regrets, a message from the future signaling that it’ll all work out? I’d rather not delude my younger self and rock her into a false sense of stability, she was raised to be adaptive and that’s how she got me here so I’d like to let her rest in the past and allow her to fail and fight and impulsively light all the fires of careless chaos I know were written of her. The life has been lived and the past cannot be revisited, change exists for our future selves, that is where you put hope.
I’d also rather not lay my life bare for an audience to read and produce a dull list of things I’ve done for people to view as achievements or how far I’ve come. Spilling the length of life I’ve traveled since my innocence and reducing what has bruised and cut me on the way, all to formulate a lesson or takeaway for strangers to consume. Memories are far too precious to melt down and pour on a page in the hopes that they’ll crystallize once read.
I stopped looking at time passing as something I would want to go back to, life is too transient to dwell on the ghosts of regret. Dreaming. I’ve always been a daydreamer, always used my mind to escape because I knew my psycho-landscape offered me far more than this place ever could. I was never satisfied with reality, knew this world was wretched and never held on to its physicality. Reality is not grounded, it’s perhaps the biggest indoctrination of the living, the grounding of the earth. The mirage of permanence that is presented as living.
Reality is a realm that will make you feel secure only for the ground to engulf you and force you into the voids of detachment and drown you in the body of water that is experience and the fleeting electric currents of joy and the tides of sadness and inevitable piling of grief that we are burdened with for the eclipse of time we are permitted to stay in this dimension. But dreams are far more real, there’s no misunderstanding in its fantasy and I’m far more comfortable with the honesty that comes with that, in a space that you’re constantly falling because the ground has never existed.
