I met my younger self for coffee. It’s 2018 and it’s her first time at Starbucks. I can buy my own coffee now, and she relied on the gift cards she got for being overly involved. It was a $10 gift card, and she kept telling me how excited she was that she could afford a vanilla bean frappuccino after all these years. I smiled at her and we sat down. I asked her how she did it; she said she won this award at her summer program and they gave her the gift card to make up for forgetting to announce her name at the award ceremony. I told her we won that award every summer until we aged out, and now we’re teaching for the same program at a different location this summer. She told me she didn’t know we would make it this far.
The first thing she asked was if anything changed. She asked if mom and dad finally stopped doing the drugs and if they could finally stay awake long enough to talk to me, and she wanted to know if they did end up buying a house or a car. For a second, I hesitated.
“I have a different mother now,” I said.
“What do you mean,” she asked.
“I guess I’m adopted. I don’t really talk to mom anymore,” I hesitated. “We were homeless again.”
I watched her face droop and she didn’t know what to say. She decided saying nothing was better but I saw the need for more information in her eyes. I remembered being her once, not knowing anything but wanting to know everything.
“Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t very good. A lot of stuff happened. There was a car for a brief moment, but mom and dad totaled it. So I don’t live with them anymore. I don’t talk to them either, I guess.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” I paused for a moment; I remember feeling like this. I remember feeling like there was no point to anything, and I saw in her eyes that she didn’t want to deal with the abuse anymore. She didn’t want to keep pretending like nothing was wrong if it was just going to continue on the same trajectory, because every time something happened, she was promised it would change. And it never did. I remember being her, 12 years old and alone.
“But it gets better,” I said. I think if it were still me, I’d want to know that. I don’t know if she wanted to hear that again, but maybe it was different because it was me telling her. And that makes it true, I think.
“People keep saying that,” she said after a breath.
“Yeah,” I said. “They do. But they’re right, too. It won’t feel like it for a while. And it gets worse before it gets better. It gets really bad actually. Sometimes I don’t even know how I’m here. But I am! And I love being here too! I love life more than anything in the world. I love humans and I love love. There are so many beautiful things that I’ve never appreciated before. But life is worth living if it means I can exist in the same place they do.”
She didn’t respond immediately. And then the tears in her eyes welled up, and suddenly she was crying. She missed her mother, and she thought she’d never be loved again. But here I was, telling her that she will have the life she’d always wanted if she just stuck through the horrors for a little longer. She just needed to be strong, like she always had been, and she’d be just fine. I knew she’d be fine; I always did.
“What do I do?” she asked finally.
“You keep living,” I said simply. “That’s all you can do, really.”
For a while, we talked about small things. I told her I’m a cat person now and I don’t really want a dog anymore, and that I can still eat just a handful of rainbow sprinkles if someone gave them to me like I did when I was six. I told her I like girls, which she didn’t know how to respond to, but I hope it makes her feel better about herself when she figures it out herself. We laughed back and forth. She told me she wanted to be an actor, and I told her I wanted to be a writer. I told her I’m studying English in college, and she told me she’s doing math at the gifted program for gifted and talented kids. I laughed a little bit. We’ll never do math again, but I’ll let her explore for now.
There are things I didn’t tell her; what happens during the homelessness, how horrible the first semester of college will be, that we made people cry at graduation. I know she can handle all of it, because I’m alive. When she stood up to leave, I pulled her into a hug.
“Thank you,” I said. Because after all, she’s the reason we’re having coffee at all.
I hope we meet again soon.