Summary: A Letter to the Person I Will Become
Series 05: Who You Are When You Forget
Dear.
That is the first difficulty. Who to address. Not the person the author will be, because she does not know who that will be. Not a stranger, because the reader is not a stranger. The reader is the author, at a distance that cannot be measured, reading this letter or having it read to her, and the distance between them is the subject of the letter.
The companion piece to Series 05 is a letter written in first person, by a voice that does not name herself but could be anyone reading it, to a future self who may not remember writing it. It is not a medical directive. It is a human document: the specific person the author is, described in the specific language only she would use, so that the people who care for her will know who they are caring for.
The letter begins with coffee. Strong, with a small amount of oat milk, at 6:30 AM, before anyone else is awake. Not because this is important but because it is specific. The person who reads this letter should know this. It is not a preference. It is a ritual.
The letter names the song to play when nothing else works. Not the one the author thinks she should love. The one that actually does something when she hears it. It names the story that has made her laugh her entire life, told in full, because it should exist somewhere in writing. It names the specific nickname for her sister, the childhood diminutive that no one outside the family knows. It names the window she wants them to let her open, the contribution she wants them to let her make.
The letter describes the texture of being a specific person: what she cared about, what she was afraid of, the way she moved through a room, what she always said when she was trying to be kind, what she always did when she was overwhelmed. She went outside. When she was happy, she cooked. When she was trying to be kind, she always said: “I’m glad you told me.”
The letter is not a goodbye. It is a handoff. The person writing the letter and the person who may read it are the same person across a distance the letter is built to bridge. The writing is an act of being present for yourself, ahead of time, waiting on the other side of whatever is coming. The window is open. The air is coming in. The coffee is strong. The morning is hers.
The reader who knows they should document who they are but has not started now has the letter they can write, in the voice they already have, starting with how they take their coffee.
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