Dear Future,

10/28/23

Dear future, 

This (unseasonably warm) morning, I biked to a morning meditation astrology food workshop. Sometimes life really does feel like a sitcom. I arrived at a cookbook-themed shop, where I and two other people listened in detail as a woman wearing very white socks and tasteful jewelry poured us marshmallow tea. She told us to put licorice on our altars, to use cinnamon and salt for bad dreams, and to practice spiritual energy hygiene. I did not laugh. 

Instead, sipping my unsweetened tea during our guided meditation, I thought (again) about the search for intuition. Recently, it seems like everyone is looking for a way to trust themselves and validate their choices with some set of truths. This quarter-life crisis is coming on strong. Rules and regulations have a strange appeal; everything I’ve built seems unsubstantial, cardboard and sand. As we were led, in our meditation, over grassy knolls, and into dark, animal-leaden forests, I imagined communing with my older self, the one in a harsher body, world. She asks me if I remember things like wearing sweaters in October, snow, and CD players. She asks about my family, and friends, with yearning in her voice, and I remember that no one will last forever. Who am I to judge Scorpio season if it gives someone what they need?

Israel is currently carpet bombing Gaza. I went to a ceasefire rally in Grand Central. We sat on the ground and sent screams up the whispering walls, hoping their echoes would ripple. It seems impossible to keep living in the shadow of murders, wars, secrets, and lies, and still, we do.

In February, I’ll have been out of college for the same amount of time that I was in college. My socks have 6 large holes in them. Neither of these things seem handleable.

Since my last letter, I’ve started therapy (again), and I’ve become a godmother (first time for that one). It feels like an era of my life is sliding out from under me, leaving me to fall, endlessly searching for a ledge. I don’t want to stay like this, in a free fall, but change is far scarier than the consistency of falling. I feel too young to be this old, too young to know what an in-utero hiccup feels like, to take other people’s wedding Pinterests seriously.  

Sometimes I think about how the COVID years, so irritating and tragic when they happened, have not yet revealed the full scope of their impact on us. I watch my friends, 22-year-olds in 26-year-old bodies, as they try to catch up to when their lives skipped a beat. I remember, during lockdown, feeling my priorities shift. 2020 was the only year I ever accomplished my resolutions—I had never dreamed so small before. I listened to Blondie’s Picture This:

“All I want is a room with a view, 

A sight worth seeing, a vision of you. 

All I want is a photo in my wallet, 

A small remembrance of something more solid

All I want is a picture of you”

I sang it like a prayer and imagined a full-time job, an apartment, a Friday when I could invite my friends over to breathe the same air, and a screensaver with someone I loved on it. Now, I look through my bedroom window at the church outside, and think about my planned Friendsgiving, and worry it might not be enough. 

New York, that stinky bitch, is the same. Sometimes I feel like I’m not doing anything here: I don’t save money, I don’t have fun, I just sit in my apartment and eat TUMS. On Halloweekend, we all went through the motions: a sexy costume, a pregame with 5 different songs named “Monster”, and mini candy pieces to line the stomach. When Mr. Brightside came on, it felt more embarrassing to sing along than it ever has, because it reminded me of a time when there was no irony in my voice as I sang the lyrics. We all knew each other when. We are all different from then. But we can’t put our fingers on why or how. 

The morning after, we pick up the cheap tulle and polyester from the floor, brush it off, and prepare it for its return to the Amazon warehouse. No one feels bad about this. There will always be another Halloween, another occasion to wear a bra as a shirt, another community meditation on the food of the stars, Sagittarius season.

Already we are casting our minds to next year, saving the costumes of celebrities in some folder in the back of our minds so that we’ll be prepared, once again, to become someone else, if only for a night.