dearest girl,
with your name brand jeans
and perfectly styled “average” hair,
over-plucked eyebrows,
and desperately swinging hips.
please listen to me.
i remember you.

the boy who broke your heart last week,
who made you feel
unimportant,
forgotten,
irrelevant,
small,
and young.
in six years, he will beg your forgiveness,
and you will kindly remind yourself
that you’re better now,
and he will continue on his sad road.

you will change your mind about children,
and the two you bear will be your world.
they will frustrate you,
and the journey to a professional career
will be all the harder,
but every day you will thank your womb
for their laughter,
and the sparkle in their eyes
when they come to you for goodnight kisses,
and sing you songs,
and draw pictures of you together,
which will hang on the fridge,
and on your heart.

your parents will age,
and you will wish that you’d been better.
you will wish you’d been less bitter,
and you’ll understand their concern,
their need for authority,
their attempt to control,
to save you.
you will love them,
and they will still love you,
and for now, you still have time to make up
for all the times you screamed “i hate you”
at the top of your lungs.

you will fall in love,
and you will break your own heart,
and in some ways,
you’ll heal,
but you’ve long forgotten
the other hands who touched you,
and the reasons why you ever thought they
were important anyway.
you’ve learned that your body
is more than just their playground,
and you’ve repainted a few things,
planted seeds,
and learned to love yourself.

you don’t hurt yourself anymore,
and you do your best to help people who
haven’t gotten that far yet.
you have bad days,
and you have good days,
and you have days which feel like nothing at all,
but you’re always moving forward,
even if it just means lying still.

i still have some of the things you wrote,
and i look at them sometimes,
and i see how much we’ve grown.
and i see you sneaking through windows,
to sit under the moon and write about
how sad it is, and how wrong it is,
and how nothing ever seemed to go right.
and i want you to know that it never
just magically starts being perfect.
life has a strange way of never really
doing that.
but you learn to be strong,
and you learn to be yourself,
and you learn to forgive,
and you learn to change, when needed,
and how to walk away.

and i am proud of you,
because we have come so far.