Dear Future Me

So….five years on I assume that you are financial stable, witty at parties and have managed to lose those ten kilos you couldn’t move in your metabolically advantaged twenties. You can hold your drink, and no longer smoke – yeah you used to and it was gross. You’ve embraced the fact that you can’t dance to pop music and so you’ve stopped embarrassing yourself trying, you have finally given in and you’re wearing flats right now and you are now far too busy and important to sneak off for pedicures in your lunch hour (and if not important, you have better priorities).

I wonder what the future will hold for you. There are many things that I have pondered, least of which:

* Are boys still wearing their sister’s pants and are you still affronted by their tiny bum sitting over the top of the waistband
* Are girls still wearing tights as pants?
* Does Marieke Hardy still have a career in breakfast radio? If so, I’ll assume you’ve already dug your eyes out with a spoon or moved onto an Adult Contemporary station.

Anyway, I’m sending you this letter because I think my life will change quite soon. How do I know this? Well the past five years has been full of many trials culminating in your redundancy at Sensis (by now you’ve worked out that it happens to everyone and dealt with all of the unsolicited advice). As I write this I am trying to find you a job, a rewarding job that will get you back on the path that I paved thus far. And Nick, who is a blessing and a gift, I already love immeasurably but, by now you’ve probably cemented it and I expect that you are starting a family, a family of ginger kids (I tear up for you when I think about that - not the ginger bit)is about to go to Canada for the first time to fulfill his mountain biking dream.

I’m constantly thinking of ways to make life better for you, to make you “successful”, happy, whatever than entails. When I’m having a bad day, a bad week, a bad time of it – just believing that my actions today might make you happy somewhere, sometime, is what gets me through the day. The past is set but the future is free, and you live in that wild place.

I hope I’ll like who I’ve left you to become, and who you’ve chosen to be. It isn’t so easy to picture you existing outside of my mind, because you’ve always been the woman of my dreams. As my future self, you’re the most important person in my life, and yet we will never meet. Our paths will never cross, you know all my secrets but I will never know yours. When it comes to you, I can only trust. Trust you’ll have achieved a few of those things that we’ve always wanted, and they were worth all the effort.

I have faith that your life right now is very fulfilling and secure and that when you emerge from our past, Future Paddy, you will fly.

Love, me