Of Letters To Myself

For someone who loved writing letters a lot, it’s just occurred to me that I have never written a letter to myself. This train of thought is sponsored by an electricity outage otherwise known as load-shedding. Can you believe the country as a whole takes turns to use available electricity?

So here I am sitting in a room dimly lit by my laptop with its screen angled downwards so I can see my keyboard; for all the so-called writing I do, I cant type without looking at the keys on the keyboard… I feel a tiny bit like a fraud… Dear Santa if you are reading this, my next laptop should have a keyboard backlight and a long-lasting battery.

Where was I? Oh yes! I have never written a letter to myself…. The one time I sent myself a Valentine’s day card back in junior secondary school so I could be one of the cool kids who received cards, doesn’t really count… Ironically it cost me a Valentine’s day dance with a crush as they didn’t want to be a side dish when I had a perceived main meal…

So, here I am, sitting in a room dimly lit by my laptop screen angled downwards; and taking a trip down memory as I write the first of letters to myself…

Dear two-year-old me

You cant read yet, so I have no idea how this will make any sense to you… Maybe I am writing to the part of you that still exists, inside of me, clearly, I don’t know how time-travel works.

For a two-year-old you sure to do talk a lot, or so I have been told, considering you cant walk or even crawl. Your grandparents will be a little freaked out by how you can string up sentences following a very adult reasoning, like exclaiming that the clouds in the sky signify rain. Some might wonder if there is a problem with your psychomotor skills as kids your age have started walking and you cant or wont even crawl.

Never mind them you don’t like getting your knees dirty; when you are good and ready, you will simply get up and walk.

In the meantime, you talk like a lord, ordering people to do your bidding; to lift you and carry you about like a man-child king. You talk a lot, for a two-year-old, I have already mentioned that but see I wonder, if we are born with a finite number of words we can speak, just like how the average person has about a billion heartbeats.

Careful not to use up all your words… that might probably explain why you grow up to be rather silent, you talked too much and now I have to conserve the words I have left, like a nomad hoards water in a desert sojourn, reluctantly meted out in the barest of sips…

On the other hand, I might never have started writing if I had spoken all the words I am on the verge of always almost speaking , so there is that…

Lastly, please don’t share ice cream with the dog.

Yours

Me… eh I mean you

~B