Letter to a dead girl.

Margareth Green

12th Avenue 45/123

Manhattan NY, 10020

Maggie Greensleeves

Edgar Avenue 56

Ravenback,ME 04759

Hello

I don’t know why I am writing this. Whether or not I should be writing this at all. I won’t be able to change anything, even if I wanted to.

I am sitting here and thinking about our past. The coffee I need to stay awake burns a little in my throat. I want to start crying.

Yeah, the world is a entirely different place than the one we imagined in our childhoods.

You know, when we were young we could dream for hours about what the future would be like. We watched Terminator and Back to the Future, read 1984 and Do Androids dream of electric sheep. We listened to A Space Oddity and dreamed of meeting Major Tom. We laid on our backs on the roof of a small yellow van, looked at the stars and thought whether or not there is life on Mars. We wondered how the first aliens would arrive on our planet and hoped it would be just like in E.T

By the way : that van, our van, still stands there, abandoned and alone amongst the pine trees.

We honestly believed that in 2015 there would be flying cars and robots and television-phones and hoverboards. Now there are roomba’s and electric cars and smartphones…to be honest with you – I would swap them for the flying cars any day of the week. Heh.

Back then you always told me that I was going to be a great writer, that I had a talent for playing with words. You always said that I was going to have thousands of fans, live in a huge mansion and  be the youngest winner of the Nebula award ever. That my first book would immediately become a bestseller and that it was going to be adapted by Stephen Spielberg and star Johnny Depp and Molly Ringwald as the leads.

Look at me now. Writer for a monthly female magazine. You know the ones – full off rose and glitter and tips about how to shave your legs and how to be good in bed. The kind you always hated. It seems, funny enough, that I do have talent…but not for the things I believed.

Outside it is cold and windy and gray and it feels like the air is cutting your lungs. The cold light of the morning falls into my room through the big glass window. I can hear the honking of cars outside and the chatter of people walking on the street – the music of the big city. I am sitting behind a table from Sweden and writing this letter to you. With pen and paper, because where you are now they don’t have internet. I am not even sure whether or not you know what internet is in the first place.

My days are dull and repetitive, sliding past like the grey rail tracks beneath the wheels of the metro I take to get to my work. Every morning I drink coffee in the Starbucks – that is a restaurant chain, very famous here – and every Friday I get drunk on Martinis and Cosmopolitans. On Thursday night I watch Sex and City, you don't know it, it is a tv-show about women in Manhattan – and dream about the life they have.

As you can see, I have changed my name – it was originally too long and too complicated to place beneath the articles.

I am even married. When I married him he was a nice man, funny, likeable. Changed, eventually. All his nice parts of him – his sense of humor, they way in which he could enjoy life – were eventually sucked out, killed, by the boringness, the grayness, the deadliness of Manhattan. He was broken, piece by piece, by the giants with the glass eyes and statistics for brains.

Now we are living our “happy” family life together – me, him, our 18-year old daughter and our 10 year old son. My relationship with my son is terrible,with my daughter – even worse. Yesterday, we had a fight and she ran away.

Then I sat down and wondered – how could this have happened ? How and when did I change ? What has happened to turn you into me ? What happened to that rebel girl, all torn jeans and leather jackets, listening to Dead Kennedy’s and AC/DC, sneaking into the cinema to watch Robocop ? Why do I see this person in the mirror and how can I not even connect to someone who is like a younger me ?

Back then, when I was younger, I could never imagine that my life would be like this. That I would leave my childhood home behind in Maine, that house in a dead-end street of a small city lost in the forests.

When I was younger I always said to myself – “One day, I shall change the world.” Eventually, the world changed me it seems.

Sometimes I want my youth to return. But it went away and I even cannot say when. When I first went to college ? During my first job interview when they said that I don’t fit their profile ? Or was it a slow process, piece by piece until all I knew was gone and I could not recognize myself in the mirror ?

I may never know.

With love, Margaret Green. Yourself, 30 years into the future.