I promised myself I’d post the first of ten letters last night, but it didn’t happen. So today, I’m keeping that promise by posting not one, but the first two. This is where it begins.
Dear Carly girl,
Honestly, I didn’t want this to be the first letter I wrote to you. I thought it would come last, once all the others had taken shape. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized it belongs here at the beginning—as the framework, the foundation, the place where everything else grows from.
I wonder sometimes about the things you used to daydream about—what worried you, what made you nervous, what made the rest of the world disappear for a while. What was it, little one, that made your chest clench or your heart race? What was it that made you feel alive?
For a long time, I blamed our earliest years for the weight we carried into adolescence. That’s part of the truth, but not the whole. Life never paused, no matter how unready you felt. Some days dragged on forever, but time still moved, and you still had to live it.
The world you stepped into was frightening, but it wasn’t only that. It was beautiful too—I just wish you could have seen more of it, instead of being swallowed by shadows. At thirteen, the door was cracked open for you to decide. You closed it. You walked away. From then on, love began to feel like loss.
And with that missing half of love came the quiet pull of alcohol. You drifted through high school, already counting down the days until twenty-one, certain it would be your real arrival into adulthood. But what looked like freedom was a trap. A prize wrapped in chains, disguised as belonging. The world celebrated it. You mistook it for survival.
When people ask what I’d change about my life, a dozen answers rise up. But really, there’s only one. I would protect your innocence. It must have been unbearable to hold your feelings so tightly with nowhere to put them. The world would have looked brighter if your mind had been cared for first—before the desperate search for love, before the escape routes, before the silence.
If I could sit with you now, I’d tell you this: your feelings were never too much, and your voice was never too heavy. You deserved tenderness long before you found it. And you still do.
With love,
Me
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