Dear Past Self by Nin Andrews

When I visited my childhood home last week,

I could see you in the windows of our stone farmhouse

with your pink glasses and tiny eyes . . .

No, you weren't ever that small, but that's how I see you

now, as small as Thumbelina, and our house too, and the barns

where the horses and chickens slept, where the kittens

and foals were born each spring. Once, when the horses kicked 

their stalls and whinnied in the night, you ran barefoot in the dark,

flashlight in hand, to check on them, and back in bed, unable to sleep

and out of breath, you wrote, Dear Future Me in script, imagining

me now. That was the night Dad's horse, Ella, died. We phoned

the vet, but by the time he arrived, Ella was dead. You tried

to think of other things, like how you wanted to grow up and be

a horse, or the fastest runner on earth, or the best high jumper.

That's what you wished for on every birthday, star,

and on every point of pie which you saved to eat last

because otherwise your wish wouldn't come true—at least according 

to your dad. You practiced eating grass, whinnying and trotting, 

cantering and galloping, before jumping all the horse jumps

one by one. Sometimes you fell and skinned your knees 

or banged your head, but you kept practicing until your legs ached, 

and you were soaked with sweat. But still you couldn't sleep.

Dear Future Me, you wrote in entry after entry. Please come back. 

Don't forget. Write about me. About the horse I am. Or almost am.

Only make me prettier. And fast. Back then you didn't love you very much

and hoped I'd make you better after the fact. Which is strange,

I think, for a child. Strange also to be an insomniac, already 

staring out the window at the dark, afraid of sickness and death

and old age, already picturing yourself as an old woman looking back

or down, like an owl swooping over the fields of the past,

memories like scared mice scampering through the grass.

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