from your past self
Dear Reader,
Three weeks ago today, it appeared in my inbox: a letter I don’t recall writing.
I was on FaceTime with my family when I got the notification. Overcome by curiosity, I swiped the window with their faces to the side and tapped open the email.
On the other end of my phone screen, I could hear the sounds of the kitchen as Mama and Nani prepared for dinner: the exhaust fan, the rattle of the silverware drawer. These were the sounds I often heard through the thinly insulated floorboards of my childhood bedroom. The same sounds I had likely heard four years ago as I sat at my desk overlooking the tree-lined backyard to compose this time capsule.
As I read, the membrane between past and present began to thin. The early days of the pandemic rushed back in vivid detail, and my heart ached for the simultaneous pain and simplicity of being nineteen.1
NOTE / CONTENT NOTICE:
The below excerpt describes feelings of hopelessness and apocalypticism during lockdown.
Dear Future Naira,
I'm writing to you on July 23rd, 2020. We're in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It's summer vacation, I've just completed my first year at Columbia, and I don't know what's coming next. For fall, they're allowing us the choice about whether or not to return to school, and I'm torn. I'm worried that this pandemic could go on for a while, and that maybe returning in the fall might be the only semblance of normalcy I'll get for a long time. I don't want to think that way, but some experts say that with the US's poor handling, this thing could last up to five more years. I hope you're out of it by now.
If you are, if your life has returned back to normal, I urge you to feel grateful. I've started missing the smallest things– sitting in the middle of a crowded park on a hot summer day as music drifts from speakers, as people play frisbee and I hear sprinkles of laughter, going to the movie theater and binging on snacks, hugging my friends, eating at [redacted], excursions to the city, art museums, shopping, traveling. If you're able to walk outside in a crowded place with people casually brushing by your side without paranoia, if you're able to sit down on grass in a public place or peruse grocery aisles, thank God and know how lucky you are. You don't realize how much you take normalcy for granted until it's taken from you.
I remember my last day at Columbia in the spring term. I thought I was simply going home early for spring break. A.L. was in Central Park and M.G. was out. I didn't even get to say bye to them. I texted my friends that I was leaving. N.B. showed up at my door to see me once before I left. He was just standing there in the doorway and my already packed suitcase was on the floor. When he left, I considered hugging him but didn't. I wish I had hugged him. L.B. told me they would come from Barnard to say goodbye. I'm so glad they did. We walked outside to the grass. Everyone was lounging there, eating their lunch or tossing footballs, it was so crowded. We found A.M., K.O., and J.T. playing spikeball. We joined them, we laughed at how bad we were. Then, M.M. came to pick me up. I hugged them all. As I got my single suitcase from my room, brought it downstairs, and rolled it to the side entrance, they called my name, waving frantically. I smiled.
I replay that memory often, filled with warmth […]2 but also with regret that I never got to say my proper goodbyes to some people. I hope I see them soon and that we're still friends.
This may sound dramatic to you now, I hope it does because that means things are back to normal, but sometimes I'm convinced we're approaching judgment day. With the protests and more and more police brutality, with people dying of the pandemic, with a case of the bubonic plague found in Oregon, with New York falling to chaos, with the impending election and new discriminatory policies from Trump every day, with murder hornets, I ask myself how one prepares for the end of the world. I ask myself if all this will be some absurd memory in the future, or if this will be the new normal. Or if there is a future. I pray to become stronger in my faith, I pray to make progress. It's all I can do.
From Monday to Thursday, I do my internship with [redacted] during the day. I'm running an Instagram campaign for them. On Friday evenings, I teach English to A.H., a second grader in China. I meet R.Y. on Mondays, I meet my Columbia friends on Sundays. I cook a lot and make ice cream […] The rest of my time I fill reading the unread books on my bookshelf and working on my novel.
I've been writing my novel for three years, and finally finished a rough draft, though it was only 150 pages. Now, I've started re-writing and lengthening it and I'm on page 50 or so of the rewrite. I feel like it's a never-ending process and I'm never satisfied with the results [...] I hope I can finish a project sometime soon, because I love writing, but I'm losing faith. Maybe I should invest myself more in poetry. I've been writing quite a few haikus.
I hope you (me) haven't given up on writing because you love it. I hope you've found ways to create beauty, to make it work.
I'm writing this all because I want you to remember what this moment was like. I want you to be grateful for the arrival of the future, because right now I don't even know if there will be one. I want you to be grateful for normalcy. I want you to thank God.
I hope, right now, you are doing something you love that fills your heart, that gives back in some way. I hope you're in a place you love. I hope you don't take the people in your life for granted, especially the friends that right now I am unable to hug or see. Make sure to tell the people in your life that are meaningful to you that you love them, make sure to hug them often.
Thank God for where you've been, for where you're going, for the pockets of joy, for nature and clean air and crowded places.
I love you.
--Your past self.3
When I first read this letter, I thought about the expansive nature of love. About how, though I have fallen out of touch with some of the friends I mentioned, I carry them with me still. About how some of the people I love most today were complete strangers to this past version of me. About all the people I am destined to love who have not happened yet. I also thought about the proximity of the past compared to the future. So many of the concerns I raised are still pertinent today, even though I didn’t expect them to be. And I remember the nineteen-year-old version of me so clearly, even though she did not know me at all.
In the three weeks since the email, I have returned to it often.
Full of grief and lost hope but also tenderness and, at times, even optimism, the words feel unequivocally like a portal out of what scholar Robyn Maynard calls “the murderous familiar”4 into new ways of being and living.
My present is thrown into sharp scrutiny, juxtaposed with my past self’s articulation of both the tragedy of what was, and the hope of what could be.
The letter is a reminder to defamiliarize myself with and see anew the things I take for granted. It has also illuminated the areas of my life in which I need to re-calibrate in better alignment with my values.
A dear friend recently shared the wisdom to “build a home— of peace, justice, and freedom— in yourself first. Once you do that, you can build it in the world around you.”
I hope that this gift from my past self helps me build that home.
I hope you remember your own past self, and that they help you do the same.
For more on the hyper-specific jumble of emotions tied to the final year of teenhood, I recommend Lorde’s album Melodrama, one of my favorite works of musical artistry, which poignantly articulates it all.
Sections removed for length
Originally, though I wanted to share this letter, I debated including it. The thought of posting what was essentially a diary entry so publicly felt counterintuitive. But then, I realized my past self hadn’t seen this as a diary entry so much as a correspondence. There is a clear divide between the “I” of my past self and the “you” of my present. The letter is intended for an outsider because I am positioned as an outsider to myself.
Maynard, Robyn, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Rehearsals for Living. Haymarket Books, 2022.
The letter from your past self helped settle my nerves today. You put my today into a context that makes my immediate problems smaller. You inspire me.
Beautiful. Really got me thinking/feeling today!