Learning To Love You More

Here is Assignment #53 Give Advice to Your Past Self

Advice To Samantha Allen at 18

Dearest Past Samantha,

I am writing this to give you two pieces of very good advice that you will need this year that you become a legal adult. While what I am going to tell you may seem stupid and insignificant please believe me I tell you that both these events will have an overwhelming effect on your life when you get to where I am writing you from. First of all I know you want to go on the Retreat this June to help out Ms. Karen, but please don’t. On that retreat you will re-meet a boy named Andrew, and that will change your life forever. You will fall for him, hard, and let me tell you now, no matter how much you hope, and think, and wish, and believe, HE IS NEVER GOING TO BE WITH YOU. I’m sorry to be harsh but I am saying this over three years after the fact and I am still hung up on him. He has good aspects he really does, he is going to help you through a time in your life when a lot of your friends are physically leaving you, but for the good he has done, the bad is fifty times worse. He will have your heart on a tether and will constantly twist you around until you are so dizzy you can’t see. I wish I could tell you how many times you will cry over him, but I have lost count. I wish I remember how many times he has raised your hopes only to smash them with his next word, but I try to block them from my own memory. The only way I can think of to protect you from him is to tell you not to go on that retreat, so that you won’t meet him, and this huge part of your heart will remain yours, not floating around in limbo because he didn’t want it, and no one else has been able to rescue it. It is years after the two of you have met, and me, here in the future is still trying to fight off the love, and affection I have for him. Every time I think that I have won, he comes waltzing back into my life the way only Andrew can, so please I am begging you, stay away, and if you must go, don’t exchange phone numbers. It has been years, and you still have not seen him face to face, and that only makes the perverse relationship you will have with him worse. Please listen to me.

Now the second piece of advice, and this one is more important than simply guarding your heart, or not falling for someone you will never have. At the end of July, Thursday July 19^th 2007 to be exact, you will be in a head on collision that will land you in shock trauma for three days, and in Physical Therapy for three months. Please avoid Tolgate road, or even driving at all that day. It costs our family over 50,000 dollars in damages, hospital bills, and insurance coverage. You know that apple red used car you got as a graduation present, that despite how old it is you love? That car will be gone, scrap metal, and you will have also endangered someone else’s life because it will be your fault. If you don’t listen to me about Andrew please listen to me about the accident. You go through so much pain, such a life changing experience that I can’t even describe it and I went through it. You will have to re-learn to walk, you can’t bend your knee for months, and to this day an eight-hour shift at Red Lobster leaves you sore and limping.

Both of these events are real, they happen, and they change you. I am not the same girl you are, I have changed, and if you don’t want to change then avoid these two things. I am only telling you this because I love you and I want your suffering to be at a minimal, because it is my suffering too. So listen to me and maybe our lives will be a little better for it.

Yours,

Future Samantha

P.S. ~ Don’t get too attached to your long blonde hair your so proud of…it won’t stay that way for long!