Us, In Italics

Dear Future You,

The Right Now You is sitting on the edge of the bed, completely engrossed in Top Gun. Haven't you seen this movie a million times before? I guess the thrill of Maverick's resurrection necessitates a re-watch. It's a hot night and you push the sheet aside, mumbling that Top Gun was essentially a chick flick and Die Hard is a true testosterone fest.

The crickets in the still of the night seem to agree with you.
Me? I'm rubbing body lotion into my legs with a vengeance. I'm young and so are you but together we've aged to a hundred, haven't we? Too bad there's no body-butter equivalent of retaining a relationship's earlier magic. But, I digress.

15 years from now seems like a lifetime. 
A lifetime which will be clumsily made up of weekends,bad work-days, good work-days, Mondays, the big moments that we seem to always be inching towards and a country's worth of different feelings.
I'm young and hopeful right now, which makes me terribly wise (Fitzgerald reference) and all this wisdom needs to be urgently written down. In case we chip these bone-china details.

Years from now when you read this letter you can remind me, that once upon a simpler time: I was happy to vegetate and watch sitcoms, I compulsively competed at every game (perhaps this was Metaphorical Sign #1?) and I adored you with as much dignity as an in-love 19 year old could manage. You know? Dignity hastily fashioned as a skirt and vehement prints of pride worn as a jacket, all too poorly concealing a dumb-ass heart. I was a proud, arrogant fool completely blind to my own condition. The very worst kind.

You were happy and laughed that uninhibited laugh. It was like a milkshake, thick and curdling with deep, nutty undertones. A laugh I spent precious moments trying desperately to earmark as my property. Perhaps, if I made a blanket fort and covered you in it while you laughed, it would stop the world and those-with-lesser-laughs from hearing it? Consumed with growing older, you were always impressing upon me the sense of responsibility you shouldered, all because you had a 6 year head start in The Business of The World. Perhaps, this was Self-fulfilling Prophecy #1.

You were always too cocky and sure of how you didn't need a 'chick's' moisturizer, “a man's skin just took care of itself”. Your vanity managed to almost decimate the common sense and general know-how I'd acquired from beauty magazines all these years.

I was always stingy while sharing my music, wasn't I? Even worse with books. Especially my worn out, thumbed copies. There was no sense behind my need to own, but there it was anyway. Not everyone could know about my music or my very favourite books. You never understood why.

It was because I was a sum of these parts: those albums and disjointed sentences hidden inside these books was what made me and sharing them would be too intimate. My greatest ode to an author would be to love him so much that I would fervently wish no one ever read him. It was fortuitous then, that none of my good friends were authors.

No one who saw us would assume we'd get along. You were calculations and numbers and I was sighing at how much fun whispering the word “whimsy” was. We made a common Universe along the way, habituated only by Messrs You & I. We made fun of the same people, mostly for the same reasons. After a certain point our fights sounded identical, we could easily speak for the other person. We were deliciously stubborn in our own ways.

It's little wonder then that we didn't work out. I kept trying to hold you inside my blanket fort and you were sharing excerpts from my books with every new friend you made. But for a single, solid moment, we owned the Universe and all that it contained.

You were watching Top Gun and I was rubbing moisturiser into my legs.

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