Dear Me That I’ve Never Met,
I may look like you. I may speak like you. I may act like you. I may be you. However, I don’t know you. I don’t know what your beliefs are. I don’t know how many friends you have. I don’t know how you feel in this moment. I don’t know what memories you have of me. I know nothing of you. Yet, I continue to think of you. I continue to picture what your life is like in my crazy, ever curious mind. I continue to hope for the best for you. You are always in my thoughts.
I go through my day one moment at a time. Sometimes that moment is staring at the clock waiting for the minutes to pass me by. Other times it is laughing and smiling with my friends, the ones who I believe will always be there. Another moment is spent thinking of you. Of how my choices will affect your life. Thinking that every insignificant decision I make will affect the life I have forever pictured you being a part of. There is never a moment on any given day that I don’t realize how I am constantly affecting your life. I’m thinking of it now, as I’m writing this letter. The list of “what if’s” scroll through my mind like the credits of a movie. One after the other after the other. It is a never-ending cycle that snakes its way through my thoughts every day of my life. It becomes the only detail I can wrap my brain around. I search for a distraction, but my daydreams bring me back to your life and my role in it.
How can you have this much power over me? I have never met you. I will never meet you. Even the most important people in my life never take up this much space in my mind. They will never have the power to break me down to tears when I think of them. They will never have the power to continuously take my new found happiness and rip it to shreds. They will never have the power to fill me with anxiety about a future I can’t control. But you do. You always will.
But you know what else only you have the power to do? Only you have the power to give me hope. Hope that spreads from within and pushes me forward. Only you have the power to show me that there is a life after this breakup, after this fail, after this hardship. Only you have the power to hold me to a standard I can not hold for myself. Only you have the power to force me to continually do my personal best, however terrible a day I may be having. The people who care about me, the ones who show me endless amounts of love, cannot do that for me. Only you can. And you always will.
You will forever be in my crazy, seven-million-track mind. Until the day we die and beyond, we will forever be a part of each other. We will never meet, and that will be okay with us. We do not need to. Our lives are never touching, but always in sync.
In this moment I am thinking that I don’t know where you are living, what clothes you’re wearing, or what you’re doing right now. I have no way of knowing. All I can do is hope that you’re living in Mercersburg, wearing an oversized t-shirt with leggings, and writing to the you that you’ve never met.