Advice From Yester-you
You didn’t start out this way. Remember how you’d thirst
for new experiences—you haven’t run out of those.
If you think you have, you’ve been lying.
It is okay to deny the fact that you ate an entire bag
of Oreo cookies. It is okay to skirt
around the fact that your white wedding dress
should have been a dusty shade of grey.
But you can’t let that defining glimmer shrivel into
nights passed sitting beneath a sticky tv tray. You can’t let
depression poison and crawl through your bright blue veins.
Go ahead and drink whiskey, if that’s what you need.
But remember that just because your skin has begun to sag—slightly—
that it doesn’t mean you have to stagnate.
Physically, your eyes may not be as wide, but your spotted
hands can still write with heart-breaking clarity.
-Jessica Gleason, 2012
