Wigleaf—

In a few months, on the last day of this year, my family will open the time capsule we made a decade ago, in the final moments of 2009, the same oversized bean can we first filled a decade before that. In intervals of ten, the five of us have leap-frogged through twenty years together, not knowing who we'd be when we landed, leaving touchstones in a tin can as a reminder.

I'm writing to you now, Wigleaf, but I'm thinking of another letter. There are folded pages in that bean can right now, filled with blue all-caps handwriting, written for some future I couldn't comprehend on the brink of 2010. That version of me will time-travel here in some small way on New Year's Eve, spouting hopes. But she'll have traveled here in a much slower way as well, a grueling stretch of years not spent thinking about the bean can at all, but the mistakes of youth, too much ice cream and homework, and love like a fever dream, gone in a blink.

If only the bean can could work both ways. I could write her a letter back, slip this between the pacifier and the Pooh Bear necklace we pulled out from 1999. I want my teenage self to read these words, Wigleaf, to wonder what you are, if you're an enemy, a lover, an alien. There's too much to tell her, all of it pointless, every bit of it would be ignored. I just need to link us somehow. That gangly child curled on the bottom bunk in her sibling's bedroom scribbling into some dream of a future. And this self, these hands, this desk in this home of mine, a thousand miles away, a decade away, this same blue ink, these words.

—Sionnain




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Finalist for the 2020 Mythic Picnic Postcard Prize.

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