Dear Younger Me

by Jenny Morelli

Image credit: Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

What you wish is actually true. Like the stray cats you’ve collected, you also have multiple lives to live before your forever life comes for you.

The life you’re living now will not last much longer. You’ll soon grow big enough, old enough, to proceed to the life after this, one full of choices and responsibilities and only in the pauses will this life glimmer and flicker like a distant memory or black-and-white film.

Then, one day, you’ll meet your forever human just like Jezebel and Spanky and Pebbles and you’ll marry your prince and live a new life with a house and a garden full of mint and lavender and happiness. The life after that will hold a job that you love, a job that will bring you back to your current life, but only for the memories you’ll use to heal the yous you see in the youth you teach.

Those students are all you, every single one, and they need you to remember what you learned about yourself in the toughest times to give them hope only you can provide, so there’s no reason to hide from your present or cry in shame and doubt, in resentment and regret.

You are continuous and all the lives you’re living will be useful for your lives after this one. That pull you feel is a future you that keeps you going. That push you feel is a past you that keeps you from hesitating when you believe you can’t go on.

You may one day miss the way things briefly are, like the cats you collect for constant companions and Mom’s afternoon snack of toasted English muffin with loads of cream cheese. But the good news is that all the bad will become a distant memory, a speck on the horizon, one of many fireflies in your lives after this one.

My point, dear Younger Me, is that everything is as ephemeral or permanent as you can remember, but nothing is a waste, not one minute of one day, because your life is not linear. It’s continuous for every future human to whom you pay it forward, good and bad.

Your life is your purpose.

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Jenny Morelli

Jenny Morelli is a high school English teacher who lives in New Jersey with her husband and cat. She is often either inspired by her students or else they're triggering memories in her of when she was young and struggling with her self-confidence. She has been published in a number of literary magazines, including Spare Parts for a novel excerpt, Spillwords for several themed poems, and Bottlecap Press for her own chapbook This is Not a Drill.