Dear Madison,
I'm currently writing to you while lost in a weird city, thinking of you. You asked me in your last post if I ever thought of you. It made me sad when you asked that. I assumed the assumption hiding behind that question was that, in our distance, I hardly think of you at all anymore. That couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, I think of you often.
I think now about how you are 23 as of today. At this end of your early twenties - arguably your last according to some people - the ages stop getting less singular and iconic and start to blend in together. The truly big milestones, 25 and 30, aren't for a little bit. 23 is small rock bobbing in and out of larger waves on a far larger shore. The big decisions are the ones you decide to make. When I was 23, one measly year ago, I had barely decided I wanted to give my degree one final desperate shot after I assumed I had self-destructed what I felt to be my incredibly fragile life in Edmonton earlier that year. Writing this now in Montréal, I feel much different. I say this all because I'm not entirely sure how you feel about your life right now - a sign of how long it has been. But, I can imagine it's not much different from how I felt. Even though I think my 23rd year was more dramatic than most, I get the impression it touched on pretty universal themes of the grand narrative of one's twenties - disillusionment, listlessness, uncertainty, sexual dysfunction, academic failure, class anxiety, etc. I had a feeling at least some of these are at least not unfamiliar.
A word to the wise is a pain in the ass (I know for a fact I've used this line on past letters), but if I could give you any word of advice, even as an old friend, is that there is still time. I know kids our age try to scare us into unc status or whatever the fuck, and that's there's supposedly no one more stressed than a twentysomething who thinks they are running out of time, but writing to you from Le Plateau-Mont-Royal in Montréal, the place I am a few steps away from living in, I can say certainly that I have learned that there is still time. Not a whole lot of time, of course. We still die. But, right now, you and I, we are still young, and there's enough time to make the lives for ourselves that we want to live. Unlike what the kids say, it's not over. Trust me. A year and a half ago, becoming a Montréaler would be totally inconceivable. Now I'm fixing the plumbing here. And I'm a fucking idiot (still the one you used to know).
In the years since we were steady compadres, I've seen and done many things. I've since encountered several lifetimes of people and things you and I used to only be able to dream about on Discord in the early part of the decade. I've encountered so many of them that there's been too many to show you in the limited time I've given myself to catch up with you. I don't think you think you know me anymore. I've written a lot about that in my new Wattpad post, which has been holed up with all the stuff I've been getting up to in The Plateau, but I think the thing I am trying to say in all of it is that I'm really the same guy from a few years ago, and I miss you, and you always have a friend in me. I hope the dim sum was half-decent, and we'll catch up and I'll tell you about everything soon - a measurable, schedulable soon - let's call it September 10th. Until then, you'll be on my mind, as you were before, even when you had no way of telling. Like the faintest of blibs on a vast, empty radar.
Happy birthday, Madison.
Very sincerely,
Ben "Skinterrain" Meier
