Letter To My Teenage Self

This post is a response to yet another writing challenge posted by Amy. The assignment was to write a letter to your teenage self. I tried to go by the name “Veronica” in high school because I loved the Elvis Costello song by the same name. After this one, I’m taking a break from the “open letter” style of blogging, promise.

Dear Veronica,

Go ahead and blow your nose. Splash some cold water on your face. Then get up, take the Smith’s “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” off the eternal repeat setting of your stereo, and put your journal away. Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air? Your mother is right, you know.

Somebody is going to love you.

It’s not going to be the goofball football player everyone and their sister has a crush on. It’s not going to be the supremely coiffed philosopher with impeccable taste in clothes and music. (He’s gay.) It’s not one of the parade of naughty or nice boys you spent endless summers at Lithuanian camp pining away for. And it’s not the guy who played Jesus in your high school production of Godspell.

Your future soul mate is a member of the juggling and chess clubs. He got the highest score on his high school math entrance exam and he is down in his basement right now, playing Dungeons and Dragons.

He’s your man.

You will meet him at a college party. Your initial reaction will be one of mild terror, as he’s going to look like this and you will be convinced that he is the drug-dealer your mother always warned you about:

But he’ll grow on you. It will take several years. In fact, after eventually dating him for a summer you will casually dump him to live in France, the place you are convinced your true soul mate resides. Once you discover that French men are actually kind of creepy and return home in hopes of rekindling the flame, it will be too late. He will be taken, dating someone else.

This man you will eventually marry, he will take you to the symphony for your first date, having borrowed his dad’s wing tips and donned an ill-fitting suit over his Jane's Addiction T-shirt. On your birthday, you will dine together at a little Ethiopian restaurant in the hood, where you will sit cross-legged on straw mats and share a dish of wat stew and injera bread. You will drink Rolling Rocks and eat thirty-cent hard boiled eggs together at Ernie’s dive bar, where you will later end up making out by the bathroom door while Patsy Cline plays on the juke box.

He will love you even after you throw out his favorite flannel shirt in hopes that it will help him come around to wearing the black turtleneck you got him from Banana Republic. One night, when you can’t sleep for the steady sound of cars driving over a steel plate in the road outside your apartment, he will indulge you by going outside clad in a ski mask and hoodie to try to move it.

When you are pregnant with your first child, he will go to Burger King at seven in the morning the day you wake up famished and nothing but a sausage, egg, and cheese croissandwich will do. He will stay by you as you scream, cry, pummel him, and threaten to jump out the window of your maternity ward room, convinced that you made a colossal mistake in daring to become a mother and fearing that you will never smile or laugh again after the birth of your daughter. He will change, clothe, rock, and bathe your baby because you are unwilling and afraid until the day your melancholy veil is lifted and you come to realize how lucky you are.

Later, when your children are older, but not yet so old that spending long winter days cooped up indoors won’t send you into a funk that only a chick flick viewed alone in a dark theatre can ease, he will come home from his own long day and allow you to high-tail it out into the cold, dark night for the sake of your sanity even before he’s had the chance to remove his suit and tie.

He is handsome, intelligent, and funny. You can talk to him about God, literature, art, and poop. And you will never have to do your income taxes again.

He’s the one.

XXOO,
You

P.S. Put out that stupid cigarette.