Dear Iris

I wonder where you will be in a few years
 
if you will read this poem and roll your eyes
at the way I idealized everything, the way
the ferocious teenager writing this poem
is so desperate to become a version of herself
that isn’t fully formed yet;
to become someone who is sophistication and
selflessness personified.
 
If you’re reading this and trying to remember
who you were at sixteen years old,
you should probably ask yourself first:
am I still that teenager, still the one with blue eyeliner
and a curling iron, and poems enough to fill
the heart of a blue whale with room to spare,
am I still that girl?
Am I still the one who counts her publications-
I think it was 37, but maybe 38, but maybe it doesn’t matter,
but maybe my worth does not depend on reading my poems
in the back section of the newspaper on Friday mornings.
Maybe my poems are extra-
ordinary on their own, but maybe they’ve
lost some glimmer over the years and deserve a polish and shine.
 
Maybe words aren’t meant to be preserved in this way,
and it’s foolish to write to myself in the future
because all that I’ll do is skim the lines and look for something
more important to read.
 
“I’m thirty now, why does it matter what I wrote at 16?”
 
Why does it matter what I wrote on my calendar the day
of my grandma’s funeral, why does it matter
what metaphors I buried inside this poem?
(shovel below the last stanza and find a
reference to my parents but don’t think
too much about it)
Why does it matter to dig up the past when the words of
a teenager bring back only a shudder of shame
and inherited disapproval:
 
“You never became that smart girl,
why would you ever have dreamt so big,
do you see what mess you’ve made by thinking only
of yourself?”
 
But, Iris:
if you’re reading this and you care,
or if you’re reading this and you don’t care,
you should know that I forgive you.
I can’t forgive others as easily
but right now it makes me unbearably sad to
imagine reading this in ten or fifteen years and wishing
that I had done something differently.
I forgive you in this poem,
I forgive you in the impossibly large heart of a blue whale,
I forgive you in the way the rain splatters against my window at night,
I even forgive you in the deep depths of my soul.
 
I forgive you in my bones and
I hope you forgive me too.
 
love,
Iris