A Letter from my Future Self

 To: A Teenager, 18

From: An Old Man, 48

Received: 24th May 2020

Sent: 24th May 2050;

Written: 25th April 2050 

I am puttering about a one-bedroom apartment, cooking in the lilliputian kitchen and basking in the glow  of the rain splattering on the high windows. This is a decade from then this is now. This is the basement  of our parents' house in Delhi where I have carved out my piece. Nobody comes here that much, so I want  it to be mine. I have carved out one of the two bed frames to make sofas and a sitting room, and I  daydream about what it's going to be like living out of this subterranean paradise.  

We always liked small places with towering ivy walls and hidden gardens didn’t we? It's a mundane life  and it's mine. I don't have to respond every time somebody calls out my name. I only have to sit in the  grass with soft music and breathe. It will come soon. You will make it soon. You will be here soon.  

Then I thought I could just rip out the tiling in the sunken floor outside of the apartment and grow flowers  and grass. Turn the entire wall into shelves for books to be bought and for the DVDs hidden away in  rotting, burning cupboards.  

This is a decade from 18. 

I think of years as people I haven't met yet, mistakes I'm going to make, memories that don't exist yet but  have got me in lost in tears and faint nostalgia. It is dotted in drowsy weekends where you purr in the  morning and everything is languid and dawn. It’s cold and calm.  

Solitude has never looked so beautiful. 

I know you dream of telling stories of playful hands and adoring eyes. Dinner dance parties as thunder  fills the earth and songs curl up from the speaker to reach it: soft and scentful like your childhood blankie.  You want to be away, be alone of all the things that used to make you seethe and grumble. This is twenty  years. You wake up to a bearded jaw, panting fur and two pairs of loving eyes in the morning. You  haven't reinstalled Grindr for a closet of a lifetime. Wedding rings are not the crimes they used to be and  you will cry in his arms at least once a month, I can assure you. You thought you were living only for  passing pleasures.  

You are not: his good morning kisses and lopsided smiles are proof enough. 

I am still fat, maybe, thin and toned maybe. I cannot tell for if the future were set in stone you would scoff  and laugh and write me off as a prank. So I'll leave certain things to the wind, and you will know love for  yourself.  

I am somewhere between the time of mom and dad now. 48, they were 45 and 50. It gets hard but  remember, you work together. The future is not set in stone and I have been given a paper and a pen and a  story to tell. Not orders, not to-do lists but a story of our lifetime. I know that you're wiping your cheeks  right now and this paradox is too much. Remember, today, it is the day for the last thirty years that you  have never failed to call up your old best friend from before Doon and wish him happy birthday. This is a  month after the day you penned your dreams. And like your dreams, these days are just enough to make it  seem but not enough to make you believe. Solitude and love had never been closer bedfellows than when  they mingled in the sun-dewed dawn and saw you dancing with your earphones on. I can see it clearly  now, us dancing at 18, at the dawn of dawn, on the day of the days ahead to come. 

All you have to do is wait and see.