To My Younger Heart
I write to you across the years like someone leaning out of a slow-moving train, trying to place a letter into the hands of a child running alongside the tracks. You are breathless. You are certain. You are tender in ways you do not yet know can hurt.
The wind that moves through you now will one day have a name—memory.
A letter that arrives late
You believe that loving deeply is a kind of permanence, that if your heart opens wide enough, the world will stay. You do not yet understand how often people are only passing through, how affection can feel like a house and turn out to be a hallway.
I wish I could tell you gently: do not harden. But I know you will. That hardening will feel like survival before it feels like loss.
You will learn that waiting is not empty. It is a room you will live in for a long time, listening to the footsteps of someone who never comes back.
The softness you mistake for weakness
You apologize too much for the way you feel. You try to make your longing small enough to fit into other people’s comfort. You fold your emotions like clothes you are afraid to wear.
One day, you will discover that this sensitivity is not a flaw. It is a quiet language. It is how you will write, how you will remember, how you will grieve, and how you will love again after swearing you never could.
But that discovery will come after many nights of sitting alone with a lamp that hums like a tired insect, rereading messages that no longer mean what they once did.
The heart learns in silence
There will be mornings when you wake up and feel the absence before you remember the name. The bed will be the same size, the ceiling the same color, yet everything will feel slightly misaligned, as if the world shifted while you slept.
You will walk through cities pretending to be fine, carrying a private weather system inside your chest. No one will see the rain unless you let them.
You will learn that healing does not arrive like a grand gesture. It arrives like daylight creeping in around the edges of curtains you forgot to close.
About the people you will love
Some of them will love you back in ways you cannot keep. Some will love you only for a season. A few will hold you with care you do not yet believe you deserve.
Do not mistake distance for cruelty. Often, people leave because they are frightened of their own reflection in your tenderness.
You will write to many of them—letters you will never send, letters that will live folded in drawers, hidden in notes on your phone, scattered like seeds you are not sure will grow.
Those unsent letters will become your map.
The night you think you are broken
There will be a particular night—later than you imagine—when you will sit on the floor with your back against a door that does not exist anymore. Your chest will feel hollow, as if something essential has moved out without notice.
You will think: this is the end of feeling.
It is not.
It is the beginning of understanding.
What you will carry forward
You will carry the echo of every goodbye, but it will not always ache the same way. With time, some memories will soften into something almost beautiful, like light diffused through fog.
You will begin to recognize the difference between attachment and love, between holding and clinging, between presence and possession.
You will learn to sit with yourself without searching for someone else to fill the quiet.
A promise you keep without knowing
You will not become colder, though you will fear it. You will become more honest. More deliberate. Less desperate, but no less capable of loving.
You will still fall, but you will fall differently—less like a cliff, more like rain.
To the child you were
So I write to you, younger heart, not to warn you, not to protect you from pain, but to remind you that every feeling you are about to experience will shape something tender and lasting.
Your heartbreak will not make you small. It will make you spacious.
Your waiting will not be wasted. It will make you patient with yourself.
Your loneliness will not abandon you. It will teach you how to keep yourself company.
And one day, when you are older than you can imagine right now, you will sit by a window at dusk, the sky burning gently into night, and you will feel grateful—not for what you lost, but for the depth with which you were able to love.
That, younger heart, is the quiet miracle you are walking toward.