“Our correspondences show us where our intimacies lie. There is something very sensual about a letter. The physical contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the letter to the mailbox--are all acts of tenderness.”
—Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, pg 84.Dear New Year's Resolution-ers,
As this year comes to a close, with a record three hours eight minutes left (at the time that this entry began) I wish you marathoners luck with your attempts at bettering yourself and the world around you. More than likely you are getting too drunk while you still can handle high calorie diets and reckless behavior. I hope your last hoorah is well worth it. I know my low-key night will be.
When we reach the end of this year and the birth of next, I hope that you are happy, and making the final moments of 2011 count, because we are never going to get these moments back. We can recount and try to relive our finest moments, but in truth, they are meant to stay in the past, mocking and encouraging us as we move onto bigger, smaller, better and worse things. It an unfortunate and lovely thing about life. We may be on the way to curing cancer and abolishing AIDS from the world population, but we are incapable of turning back the clock, and you know what? I think it is better that way. The world will still turn, babies will be still be born, and men and women are going to die. If we were meant to live forever, we would.
Dear FutureMe,
This is an email I wrote to myself on December 10, 2009, using FutureMe.org, a web service that allows you to send emails to the future. Mine arrived a day before I graduated college, and damn I really wanted a boyfriend. I was kind of an idiot as a freshman.
Dear FutureMe,
By this point in time you are either out of college or very close it. You have braved four terrifyingly fantastic years, and hopefully written a lot about the world. I hope that your GPA has stayed high and that the roommate situation for sophomore year worked out. I also hope that you snagged that job at Barnes and Noble last summer and finally found a good person to be with. And if you haven’t that is okay too.
By this point in time, Obama will have completed his first term in office and hopefully the world will be a better place. I hope and pray to God that you have somebody good by your side, whether it be a good friend or significant other. I hope that Dad has found a good job and that you have succeeded at whatever you set out to do in your college career. As I write this, it is stay in shape, get good grades, and try to survive the rocky road that seems to line freshman year. I hope that sophomore year is not as bumpy and you finally found your “Laurie” as Mom would put it. I hope that the friendships you have developed over the past four years last the rest of your life, and to coin a phrase, I hope you have snagged Mr. Right. Again, it is okay if your haven’t, but I know as well as you do that life is not worth living unless someone is by your side. If he hasn’t come, he will be coming, I can just feel it. And remember not to rush it or let it go to your head either. Take things slow and bask in it for awhile. Good things come with time, but of course you already know that. I mean you are a smart girl—-er—-woman at this point. The person writing this is still a girl, or at least a young adult…I’ve never really liked referring to myself as a woman. It just seems too formal for my simplistic and non-existent beauty choices.
