Beboptober Day 18: Don’t Lose Me
Thanks to @thestarlightsymphony for the prompt list! I know, it looks like I’ve skipped Day 17, and…I kinda have (sorry!), but not permanently. I’ve just had the idea for this for a really long time, so I’ve decided to catch up and do Day 17 at some other point during the month, along with another prompt. It will lead to things being a little out of order, but what’s life without a little variety, right?
Oh, and credit where credit’s due—I think I got the idea of Faye keeping a journal at all from Chapter 4 of @beccanoodles’ one-shot collection “With Love, From Bebop” (read it here), although in that one, Ed takes it over!
Today some of my friends and I found a Betamax tape recorder, and we all decided to use it to record messages to our future selves. It was a little embarrassing at first! I kept getting shy and having to turn the camera off and start again. I guess it was hard to think of things to say to myself ten years from now. At first, all I could say was “Good morning,” and that made everyone laugh. I suppose part of the reason why it was easier for my friends is that they know exactly what they want to be, and they can see their future selves so clearly. Sara wants to be a vetrenarian veterinarian, Mei wants to work on Hyperspace Gates. But it’s hard for me to to imagine my future self.
Ten years from now I’ll be 22, almost 23. That seems so adult! I’ll be a newer version of myself—ten years older, ten years wiser—more mature, I hope. I guess I’ll have graduated from school & university and I’ll have a job, unless I decide to become a doctor or something and have to go to even more school (UGH) and do lots of math (UGGGGHHHH). But I guess my future self knows best—maybe I’d actually be a great doctor and I don’t know it yet. I really have no idea what I’ll be doing with my life that far in the future….For a while I thought maybe I wanted to be an actress, because it sounded like fun. But I sort of gave up on that dream after I was only cast as Villager #3 in the play this year. (Vivien says it’s just because Director Chen doesn’t see my talents, but I think she’s just saying that to make me feel better!) Whatever it is I’m doing in the future, though, I hope it’s something I like, not just something I’m pushed into or anything. I bet I’ll be great at it, especially with 10 more years of experience!
Oh, and I hope that I’ve traveled lots of places and seen lots of new sights by the time I’m 22! I especially want to go to space and see some other planets. I’ve been to a few places on Earth with my family—I told you about that trip to Tokyo earlier in this diary, and we’ve also been to London and New York and a few parts of Beijing—but I’ve never actually been on a rocket, not even one that’s just in orbit. Someday I’d like to see other planets, like Mars or the Moon. (The Moon’s not a planet but whatever.) I bet it will be easier to go there in the future and they’ll have more people and stuff on them, specially with all that Mei says about the new advancing tecknology technology of Hyperspace Gates. It all sounds so exciting!
But there are also some things I hope don’t change. Like I hope that, so far in the future, I still have my friends. I’d be so sad to lose them, even if we just fall out of touch, which Dad says might happen now that we’re all entering our first year of secondary school. Maybe I’ll make new friends, though, in addition to the ones I have already. Maybe ten years from now all of us can watch the tape and laugh and remember how we used to be.
I wonder if I’ll have a boyfriend?
Now that I’m writing this and I’ve recorded the tape, I think, most of all, I hope I don’t change too much—that I don’t lose the things that make me me. Yes, my future self may seem really foren foriegn (dang it) foreign to me now, but she’s really just me, just a little older. I hope she’s still the good things my friends and my parents say I am—compassionate, caring, creative. Plus 10 years of experience and growth and stuff, of course. I hope she’s happy and she has friends, and she’s doing okay. I really want that to look forward to when I’m grown up. When I’m her, I guess.
I thought about this a lot today after my friends left and I did the rest of the recording by myself. I even put on my cheerleading outfit and gave my future self a cheer I’d made up! It’s a little embarrassing, now that I think about it…but I was proud of it. I hope my future self will like it. Or at least that it will make her laugh.
I don’t know what exactly will happen in the future, or what my future self will be like. When she arrives on the scene, I won’t be here anymore. But she won’t totally have lost me. I’m here right now, and even ten years from today I’ll still be there on the tape we recorded today and, I guess, in this diary. And in memories. My future self will know I’m cheering for her, that I love her so much and look up to her (how mature she must be!) and want things to be okay for her. I hope she’s looking back in time and cheering for me, too.
