To the Woman I’ll Meet Tomorrow Olivia Traub Every day I wake up and write a letter to myself, to read the next morning and reflect on who I was yesterday. The girl who opened her bright eyes ready to face a world built to bring her down. The girl who’s flowers on the windowsill looked brighter than they do today. The girl who opened a letter from the day before, and the day before that, and then before that, smiling at the naivety of who she once was. Today I am falling in love with the way snow feels on my eyelashes, and tomorrow I’ll fall in love with the way it melts beneath the sun. Today I’ll drink my favorite tea, and tomorrow I’ll switch to coffee just for fun. Through these letters, I’ve learned to love each version of myself just as she comes. There is no one to impress, and no one to recite lines for, there is only me and who she’ll get to meet tomorrow. Instead of waiting for love letters from partners who could never tell me what I wanted to hear, I do it for myself instead. I fall in love with myself every day all over again, always finding something new to adore. On Monday it was the curve of my knees, Thursday it was the way I sing in the shower, and today I’m obsessed with the way my eyes look at things I love. Once I started loving the ways that I am human, I realized that I had no choice but to be grateful for the cards I’ve been dealt. I’ve learned that no one will know me the way I know myself, and it’d be a shame to put that intimacy to waste.
American Literary Magazine | 66
But there are also days when I feel like there is nothing to love. When I can only see the scars from being careless, or the way my stomach folds underneath me, or get so frustrated at the way I care too much. Like any relationship, there are hardships and there are days I think loving a different body would be easier. But then I read the letters from days prior, from a girl who believed I could turn water to wine and make bread out of nothing. From a girl who was so excited to meet the woman I am today. I’ll walk with her in silence, holding hands as she tells me of all the things to love and all that she’s gone through. She didn’t write these letters just for me not to believe her, so I’ll continue to read and try my best to love myself just as she would want me to. I’ll sign my letters and seal them with ribbon, finished with perfume and a print of my lipstick. It’ll be left on my nightstand along with the version of myself who once existed, a skin of myself shed to the past. We’ll rendezvou tomorrow when the sun shines through my windowsill and the excitement of a new day fills my chest. Until then I will keep growing, keep finding new things to love, and keep the notes from a girl who couldn’t wait to deliver them the next day. I’ll move through life just as she’d want me to, and then I’ll tell her all about it the next time we meet.
