LETTER: DEAR ME

I can see you there, staring out with a mixture of wonder and fascination.  I see the light behind your eyes, shining through and illuminating the color with the intensity of youth. I know your face because it once was mine.  Your eyes are my eyes before the wrinkles of laughter and the lines that tears have slowly eroded on the sides of them.

This is an open letter to the boy I was. When the stamp comes that can carry these pages backwards through the timeline of my life, stretched like clothing on the line, I will send it.  This is a letter to be read by those shining eyes, or to those innocent ears if the tears start early and threaten a smear to the ink seeping into the paper.  Here are the rules I was never given and the shortcuts I never got to take.  Here are the secrets and the lessons you will learn when you are here and once again writing this letter to yourself, just waiting for that stamp.

Listen, because we never know how much time we have and we never, not ever, are in control of when the lights will go out and we’ll be opening our eyes to a new light again.  Listen:

Never be afraid to be proud of yourself.  You are made of magic and you share dust and light with the stars that shine above you.  Please promise me that you won’t dim your glow because it hurts someone else’s eyes.  Cry.  Really cry.  They will try to show you and tell you and convince you that men don’t cry, that they bite their lip from the inside and swallow the blood with all the tears they are too timid to let fall. They will say that men are the shoulders and are the rock that stands in the current.  Be the water instead for one day that rock will be sand and it will have been you and only you that washed it away.  Laugh.  Truly laugh.  Let life and all of its folly steal the breath from your body and replace it with the staccato melody of giggles and guffaws; the laughter that comes without fair warning and continues without apology.

Never be afraid to follow your heart.  Take all you have and risk it truly risk it for where your crazy heart decides to take you.   Do not ever think you, exactly you, are not capable of chasing your dreams and do not ever think that you, exactly you, are not worth being chased. It’s going to hurt, more than you think it will, and it’s going to heal more than you ever imagine it can.  You will be cut, scraped and scarred from these pursuits but scars are stories and one day someone will come along that will pilot the ship of their fingertips down the random rivers of your scars.  They will absentmindedly and without knowing why, press their lips to them and feel the smallest shock of life when skin touches skin.

Be kind.  Always.  Give love freely and never wait for it to come back. If it breathes, grows or has even a single cell bouncing around inside it, love it, too.  Each and every thing deserves and has earned more respect than its given so start the trend and I promise, promise that you will feel part of it all when you hold life in your hands.

Do not worry about the clothes you wear, or the fashion you might (and by might I mean will always) miss out on or the way your hair seems to always look like you were struck by lightning (which you just might be).  Do not worry about the car you drive or the money that finds its way into whatever bank, piggy or otherwise, you set up.   Do not worry if people laugh at you, do not worry about impressing because people like what they like and don’t what they don’t. Do not worry of death because I promise you, one day you will die and it will be perfectly and completely beautiful.

Take care of yourself. It’s up to you to keep your heart beating and your lungs filling and your legs running long past when you should have found your way to shuffling off this mortal coil and starting fresh.  Greet Death running and jumping and dancing with her, throwing kisses like promises
while she waits to carry you away.  Don’t make her bend or scoop or hoist or strain her delicate hands under the weight of your tired soul.  Meet her with a smile that only old age can create.

Love.  Promise me that you will love.  It will shake your skin and rattle your bones and the sheer volume of butterflies inside will threaten to lift your stomach to your throat.  Love.  Don’t think of the why or the how of the what if and just love.  When you think, if only for a moment, that you’re loving enough, you aren’t. Love until your eyes are cried dry and your arms shake from squeezing so tight.  Love because you cannot not love and because it finishes all of the pieces in you that would otherwise stay that way.  Love because it’s the answer to the question you’ll start asking one day.  It’s the answer to all the questions you’ll ever ask and the reason you are here, wherever here may be.

This is an open letter to the boy I was and to the boy that will be again.  I’m not going to send this and the stamp won’t come but you’ll learn it anyway.  Against the odds and through the tears and through more laughter than you think one body can produce.  When you stop being you and turn into me and sit here alone looking back at the you you once were, pause, breathe and start writing this again.  You’ve written it once (and by once I mean a million times over and over and over again) and you will write it again.

I am searching for my future wife/soulmate. Please stop by again.