time travel, construction, and one-eyed dogs

This summer I was going through some of my old high school notebooks and found a page where I had summed up a day with this phrase:

"It was so sweet I would have cried if I were someone who cries."

I first started experimenting with time travel fifteen years ago, when I discovered I could write little notes that said "Dear 10-year-old Brooke. Hi this is 9-year-old Brooke. You are reading this in the future! You are cool! You are 10 years old! I'm 9." Ten-year-old Brooke had a handful of visits from the past, but sixteen-year-old Brooke was bombarded with them. The week after my sixteenth birthday I opened a packet of about two-dozen letters I had written to my sixteen-year-old self, and they continued steadily throughout the year, because there were some where I wanted to write what had been going on "on this day x years ago." Thrilling. Most of them read like this:

Dear 16-year-old Brooke,
WOW you are SIXTEEN! I can't believe that. SIXTEEN! I bet it feels normal to you though, lol. I bet you are really pretty.

Dear 16-year-old Brooke,
You are the coolest person I know because you are sixteen and I don't know you yet but I kind of do because I AM you, but four years younger! I wish I were just like you. Do you drive? Do you have a boyfriend? I bet you look really cool and have a lot of friends and I think you are so great. 

Dear 16-year-old Brooke,
Hey wutz ^? (That's a cool way of saying "what's up" if you don't remember lol) You're sixteen, that's so cool. I want to marry someone who is really hot, and funny and super good looking and looks good. 

Dear 16-year-old Brooke,
Oh hi I'm 9 you are 16 do you have a boyfriend? Is he really really nice? Have you kissed him?

Obviously these have never been as useful to me as they would have been to a child therapist. What WOULD be great would be if I could send letters backwards. I would constantly be writing them. I don't even know where I'd start on what to say to myself in high school, but I know I would throw in this note: Some day you are going to be the kind of person who cries.

Because everything has me in tears lately. Happy things, sad things, so-un-emotional-it-somehow-IS-emotional things. The ultimate proof of what a mess I am is that I get choked up every time I watch this video.



Sweet, sweet man. He just wants to take his cousin to California adventure. His Disney Dollars are going to expire! Goodness I'm tearing up just typing that.

I have a soft spot for middle-aged men who don't have everything under control. I also have a soft spot for dogs missing eyes, people dropping things, old photos, when someone laughs at their own joke and no one else does, college students who practice kissing their arm because they've never kissed a girl, lost cats, Apple ads, old people around a lot of young people that aren't paying attention to them, women making fake Uncrustable sandwiches to make it seem like they can afford real Uncrustables, commercials where people make coffee and share a special moment, people randomly running into friends, grocery store cashiers who are surrounded by people all day but no one talks to them, a single mom going to Target and buying a ton of board games and asking her teenage kids to play them with her but they won't and the board games were really expensive and she can't find the receipt, and spoons that are alone in the dish drainer.

I don't think twenty-four-year-old Brooke has gotten a time-traveling letter. Probably because it would have read like this:

Dear 24-year-old Brooke
I know your eyesight is probably gone by now, but I'm assuming one of your grandchildren is reading this to you (please speak up her hearing is also really bad). 

I hope your arthritis is doing ok and that you're not eating apples with worms in them and yelling that they're perfectly fine - it grosses everyone out and it can't be easy to eat apples when you don't have any teeth left.  

Remember when you were sixteen? Did you say "Sweet Sixteen" when you were sixteen? I reminded you in several letters to say it because it seems like it would be a fun thing to say and you had an entire year to do it. I really hope you listened to that advice. Were you so pretty? Did you kiss a boy? Goodness. I can't wait to be sixteen.