If I could send one message back through time, I wouldn’t write to beg words off a writer I admire – be it Dante or Blake, Yeats or Cummings – and I wouldn’t warn away the gazes of a to-be lost love or push the glad hands of not-yet abandoned friends.
I would write to my yesterday self, who lazily left dishes for today’s me to do, and I’d rightly tell him: “Please, reconsider the sink- me urge to shirk was.
“These are citrus- scented suds, and if you let them, they’ll tickle a memory of 3 too-old oranges forgotten to bother the bottom of a wicker bowl, which in turn will return you to rethink the how of when a younger you grew 5 times in those 10 years before the death, and then you stopped caring for the 20 since.”
It’s news of the wee, menial and non-consequential tasks that gives all of these me’s pleasure now.
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