Dear Future Self

You wonder if others see you like you see yourself. Would they smile if they knew you tap away on your keyword to the accompaniment of Disney soundtracks? That you fantasize of being Mulan, Belle, and Ariel? Would they think you’re a silly, silly girl if they found out you’re still gung-ho over Hitler and how a man as small as he stirred an entire nation into a domination frenzy? Would they be stupefied to see the trail of push pins you’ve stuck into a world map, each one representing the country Hitler took with very little effort? Would they tease if they knew you fall in love as regularly as you change clothes; your heart flipping up, down, and sideways not just for men but girls and brilliance and stories and sights and sounds and the wonderful smell and feel of summer rain?

I guess they cannot tell, just by looking at you, what a scaredy-cat you are. You’d much rather spend all your time at home, watching TV, reading books, aimlessly clicking your way through blogs and websites. Darkness scares you. So do roaches, ghost stories, and eerie midnight sounds. You still try to push vegetables off your plate, of course, and you’d still much rather swallow your own spit than drink milk. You turn ghostly pale every time you need to cross the street by yourself. It’s strange, your fear of Cebu’s streets. You’ve been in the city for six years yet you still haven’t made its little alleys and dust-covered streets yours.

So yeah, you wonder when the seeming and the being would converge. Others take one look at you and see an adult. You look at yourself in the mirror and see your 16-year-old self grinning impishly back. It seems to you you’ve a host of selves, and each one is as strange as the other. Perhaps, you’re not a real person at all. Perhaps you’re simply a set of expectations and impressions, strung together so vividly and tautly they sometimes seem real.

Dear future self, you know how upsetting turning 25 in a few days is for me. I am taking a break from life. Should you need to find me before the 25th of this month, this is where you should go look: somewhere over the rainbow, where troubles melt like lemondrops high above the chimney tops.