I Met My Younger Self for Coffee...

It was time…

The café is quiet. I already know where she’s sitting. I spot her instantly…she hasn’t changed, not yet. She’s by the window, arms crossed, a slight frown on her face. She sits with her back straight, arms crossed, always bracing for something like she’s already bracing for a fight. I forgot how much she used to guard herself. Always ready to defend, even when there’s no attack. Lol, Tutu, chilllll baby.

She looks up, she takes me in. recognition, then scepticism.

Then suspicion. She always thinks the world wants to harm her.

“You’re me?”

“Yeah.” I smile, sliding into the seat across from her. “And you’re me.”

She leans back, her arms still folded. “No offence, but you don’t look like me.”

“I know.” I take a slow breath. “We changed.”

She doesn’t say anything, just stares. She always hated silence, didn’t she? Always felt like she had to fill it. But she’s watching me now, waiting for me to start performing.

I don’t…

Instead, I say, “Ask me anything.”

She watches me carefully, scanning for proof, for a trick, for anything that makes sense of this. I see the way her fingers twitch, wanting to reach for her phone, for some kind of distraction. She hates silence. She never lets herself sit in it too long. She doesn’t know how. So she goes back to what I said earlier.

“Changed how!?”

I fold my hands together, resting them on the table. “We learned to listen to ourselves.”

She rolls her eyes. “Sounds fake.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

She exhales sharply, shifting in her seat. “Okay. If you’re really me, then tell me…what about Daddy?”

There it is. The question that has sat like a stone in her chest for as long as she can remember.

“We let go.”

She flinches, but I keep going.

“We let go of waiting. Of hoping he’d see us. Of trying to be good enough to make him proud of us. We realized we were never the problem. But he finally says it…he one day will say he is proud of us.”

She swallows, and her eyes do that thing where they dart to the side. I know that look. She’s holding back. If she gives in, if she lets herself feel it, the walls might crack. And she doesn’t trust herself not to shatter.

“And Mummy?” she asks, voice quieter.

I soften. “We saw her. As more than just our mother. As a woman. With her own wounds, her own fears, her own limitations. And that changed everything. We’re best friends now.”

She shifts uncomfortably, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve. I wanted to slap her hand for doing that, but I left it…she’ll stop it soon enough “And the loneliness? Does it ever go away?”

“Not in the way you expect. But we stop carrying it like a badge of honour.”

She looks up sharply. I know she wants more. I exhale, and I continue…”Some wounds heal, and some leave scars. But we stop living in the pain. We stop searching for it.

“We stop needing the world to see our pain to prove that we exist. We stop believing that suffering is the only thing that makes us real.”

She’s irritated by me, Ahahaha she must hate everything I am saying right now. She blurts out “Then why does it feel like I have to scream just to be heard?”

“Because no one ever taught us that whispers can be powerful, too,” I say.

She blinks fast. Her mouth is open, she is not saying anything…

“But I give so much,” she cries out. “And they never…”

“I know.” I lean in. “We stopped giving our magic away for breadcrumbs. We stopped settling just to feel like we belonged. We stopped performing, stopped twisting ourselves into whatever shape we thought people would love. We learned to give to us first. And we stopped asking for permission to take up space.”

She looks down at her lap, she hates when people see her crying, I see her trembling hands.

“Did we do it? Did we make it?”

I inhale, setting my cup down. “Oh, we did. And then some.”

Her eyes widen. “No way.”

I grin. “Way!!”

She fidgets, hesitating. “Are we happy?”

I pause, really looking at her, remembering the moments she needed to hear this the most.

“Yes. But not just because of the things we did. Because we finally learned to love who we are. We stopped shrinking. We advocate for ourselves now. We ask for what we deserve. We move, even when we’re afraid. We take up space.”

She blinks rapidly, holding back tears. “You can cry”…I tell her. “I cry way more now :)”

“And love?” she whispers. “Do we ever get it right?”

I hesitate. Not because I don’t know the answer, but because I know how much she needs to hear the truth.

“We loved the wrong ones first. And one almost took everything from us. We almost died”

Her head snaps up, panic flashing in her eyes.

“But we left,” I say firmly. “We got out. We saved ourselves. And that was the beginning of everything.”

She stares at me, her chest rising and falling unevenly. These heart palpitations, how can I get them to stop? She’s the reason we have to watch our heart, ugh, this girl. I let her sit with it. Let her absorb it. She will be calmer in the future, and I know.

“It gets good, doesn’t it?” she finally asks. The anger, the loneliness, the hunger for something, anything to fill the void, it’s all still there. My poor girl…

I reach across the table, taking her hand in mine. She lets me :).

“Better than you ever imagined.”

She lets out a shaky breath and nods. And for the first time, she believes me.

I have to leave soon…I have a meeting. I give her the biggest, warmest hug I could pull out of me. I look at her, and I leave her with these words:

“When you finally step into it fully. When you realise you are the woman you once prayed to become, I hope you sit in that moment, breathe it in deeply, and say:

“Damn, I really did it.”

And I’ll be here, whispering back: Of course, you did 🧡