Most people write letters to their future selves, highlighting their goals for the next five years and letting their more grown-up counterparts marvel at their childlike innocence and naiveté. Young school-age students are told to write such a letter as a class assignment and open it a decade later, expecting a glimpse into the wonder-like mind of a sixth grader, but more often than not these correspondences are left at the bottom of a drawer somewhere or thrown away with all the rest of the student’s academic ephemera.

That’s why I’m writing a letter to my past self. I know that my thirteen-year old self will never read it; she’s already too far in the past to really absorb her more mature iteration’s ill-gotten wisdom. Still, I feel as if my past self will have marveled at my life as it stands today. I know that this is really just a letter to me, but somehow it feels as I was a different person back then. Things were simpler, different, less somehow. I just want to intimate that.

Dear thirteen-year-old self,

You’re thirteen years old, in eighth grade. I wish you could see you now. I would love to pull you out of the normal time-space continuum and see you gaping at what you’ve become. I want to see the expression of disbelief on your face.

You just got back from the library, from working on some homework assignments for your college classes. You hate college. With a passion. You have straight A’s and can’t wait for it to be over. Every day you ride the train to Chicago and walk to your university, take five classes a week and balance it all with three jobs(you may ask how that happened, but the truth is I don’t have a clue either), a social life, and a boyfriend.

You may be shocked by these revelations, but did you really expect for things to stay the same? Well, I know you did, which is why they didn’t. Things are much different from how they were in eighth grade, but some things, you’ll be happy to know, have remained constant.

You still keep in touch with your friends from grammar school. You even ride the train with them sometimes. You go with them to hang out like you used to, still go to the mall, you’re still you. Just different.

You no longer wear cheap t-shirts with Hello Kitty on them. No longer ask permission for things, you take charge of your own life. And I’ll tell you something else: you even downloaded a couple of Justin Bieber songs. You don’t even hate him anymore, I know that’s hard to believe, but the truth is people change, regardless of what you think may yet happen.

I wish I could show you a picture of you now. You’ve had braces, so that overbite-ridden smile is now straight and gap-free. Sometimes your eyeliner is a bit smudged, yes that’s right, eyeliner, you wear makeup every day, but otherwise you’ve shaped up pretty well. You are nineteen years old, just ten months shy of two decades of physical existence.

As you can probably tell, your intelligence has not waned despite external influences. You’re still the nerd you always were, but in upgraded packaging, so to speak. You’re still you. Despite your new physiognomy and six years of experiences separating us, we’re still the same. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but things have changed, and they’ve changed for the better.

I wish you could see you now.