Dear self.
It must be senior year for you now, and like all California winters, the sun will keep illuminating the iridescence of our unchanging sky. I know sometimes we used to look at the unchanging sky and hate it, wishing for thunder, rain or anything at all to change and break us free of the garden called childhood — but lately I’ve come to appreciate some of Saratoga’s predictability. I hope you do too.
The Southern California fires are still raging as I write this. I know they must have died down by the time you’re reading this, and I know that some other horrible event has taken its place at the top of your Tumblr feed like it always does, circulating fear and pain. You might still be in the center of that political transphobic maelstrom, burned as the personified devil of change by some thoughtless masses. You remember when we were young and used to celebrate Maslenitsa? We’d make a straw witch of winter and burn it? I guess when you grow up, you realize you have to be the witch yourself sometimes.
But aside from all this misery, I know (or hope, for our sake) that we’re still going at it, stoking the furnace of hope — each picture of a pretty sunset, purr of our cat — a scrap of coal to get through another day. Of course, how beautiful it is — to live? To see the moon and sun rise?
You must be getting quite nauseous with excitement at this point, I reckon. Your heart is pounding as you think of all the soft and lovely things that adulthood might bring. No more living under our parents’ hawk-eyes! No more calculus! An entire world beyond our high school, ungated by our phone screen but actually tangible, with all kinds of beautiful and horrible people and connections!
I hope we are more ready now to take on this wide world than we are right now, at least. We are 16 right now and still don’t exactly feel adult, but I hear few people do anyway. I hope our SATs went well. I hope we maintained your GPA. I hope Middle College treated us well, I hope our cats live happily, I hope we dye our hair again and I hope our plane ticket out of America is cheap.
And I hope you live, despite it all. I cannot wait to meet you.