There's a last time for everything.

You know it’s true: there’s a last time for everything. But when you feel so deeply in each experience, you begin convincing yourself that you can keep everything at once. You convince yourself that you are limitless, that you can manage to keep everything and everyone while still moving forward. You can cheat life and walk its path without offering a single trade-off.

Sometimes I find myself missing moments before they even end. I’ll see my friends laughing together in a softly lit room, and will miss them even though they sit across from me. I’ll look at my aging dad in the drivers seat of the car, his face backlit by the streetlights on a rainy day, and miss the comfort of sitting next to him. I’ll look at my youngest brother and miss his youth before it’s even disappeared. I will miss remembering the sound of voices and laughter I once had memorized.

Carrying the weight of knowing that life continues, that it takes and takes and takes, is hard. And yet we still give. That’s the beautiful, human part of it. I want to keep giving. I want to give all these memories to you, my older self. I want us to have a life to look back on. I want us to have mistakes and triumphs and heartbreak and adventures. So on we go. So even when I meet new people, knowing that my time with them may be limited, I’ll introduce myself with a smile on my face.

I used to think that it was better to just avoid getting close to anyone because it just results in hurt, but now I realize that it is a blessing to be experienced at different points in your life, and to experience others and shape them.

Please be vulnerable.

I regularly make a habit of writing letters to my future self. While many of them are deeply personal and too private to share publicly, I came across this one and thought it was worth sharing. This is more of a filler post as I work on some things that will take more time, as I want to do them justice. I hope it finds whoever needs it <3