Dear Mika,
At any given moment my head is full of buzzing thoughts, each overlapping the next in a desperate attempt to be noticed, so bear with me as I rattle off a few before they collide and burst into remnants of a fleeting thing:
I went to the post office, too, and was so anxious about the journey that I looked at the storefront on Google Maps, like I’ve never walked up to the counter to send mail before, like I’ve never parked a car in front of a building, approached the door, and knew how to open it;
I received my package, the very same one that you picked up—an Arcane fanzine, the prettiest plushie I have ever held in my hands, sparkling stickers, double-sided photocards, and the addictive joy of being a fangirl, all bundled for me, for the loving of things and art and the people that make art;
My TikTok algorithm has inexplicably shifted to voice acting prompts and sight reading challenges so for the last several minutes I’ve been revisiting the 17-year-old Becca that knew how to find A with her eyes. One video showed four staves and I settled on the second, because Soprano 2 apparently never left me.
Anyway, I didn’t want to talk about nostalgia in this letter, but I felt it flashing across the whole of my mind—so here we are.
The very heart of this project, for me, is to take the littlest bit of life, cradle it in my palms, and sent it to you with utmost affection. I suppose there’s nothing more nostalgic than romanticizing the mundanity of the past.
The truth is, a lot of the time I keep for myself—the minutes between waking and dreaming where I lay in bed and pretend I’m coherent enough to read, well, anything; the 20-minute commute to work, most recently accompanied by 2000s emo and pop nostalgia (ugh, there it is again!)—is taunted by glimpses of a life already lived.
A stuffed blue and yellow dolphin (Dolphy, if you must know), the ominous red glow of my Barbie clock (which I did buy off eBay to sate the nostalgic yearning, and it now sits in a display case because it still kind of scares me), the large CRT television that stood between identical dressers in the bedroom I shared with my sister, and the memory of it falling on me with all the horrifying severity of giant boulders barreling down a mountain.
When I was really little, I would wrap my arms around my parents’ necks like a vice when they laid me down for bed. I refused to let them go, because I loved them thiiiis much (approximately the size of small arms outstretched, which is, of course, infinite) and what if that was the last I ever saw them? What if I missed them too much when the lights went out? (The truth is, I don’t know why I did that, because I can’t remember). I would hold on and hold on and hold, until they successfully and amusedly pried my hands off and tucked me in.
I hugged my dad after a hard work day this week and was reminded, as my dad jokingly refused to let me go, of her—of little me, clinging and clinging. She exists in glimpses of daybeds and Perfection and freckle constellations and Brown & Crouppen commercials and too frail to hold up milk cartons and striped shirts and collecting sweet gum spike balls to secretly feel the pin pricks in her palms.
Glimpses, glimpses, glimpses—right there, like I can touch it, but just out of reach even if I stretch.
And that’s what really haunts me, you know?
I mean, my memory is pretty bad, but it’s the being this close to things I loved but not being able to cradle them again that—to put it frankly—breaks my heart. It’s a daily heartbreaking.
I haven’t figured out how to deal with that yet. The way things are in the world, we’re all a little nostalgic, even for things that aren’t ours. We yearn for an escape from the horrors of life, big and small and really fucking big, and the best we can do is glimpses of other worlds by way of “This Feeling” by Oneheart and “the future we were promised” Frutiger Aero pinings and (yes, regrettably) AI renderings of dark fantasy worlds.
And I could go on about why people are drawn to those, why the comment sections are filled with “I just want to live there” and “I feel like I lived here in another life” and other such sentiments of longing, but then this letter would be a book and I would end up talking in circles anyway, because I can’t solve this.
I once wrote a poem called “history for worms” describing the impossible yearning I feel for people I will never know, people from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, who played on the land that was the backyard I grew up in, that saw trees where I saw a playground, that might have dug through the dirt in hopes of finding treasure. I think of them when I pass that same street and see how they tore down the trees I saw and put up a wall instead, or how they tore down the playground and put up a building, and how all the things I knew are now intangible glimpses and I can only hope that some part of me still lingers in the dirt.
I wrote another called “the highlight reel is filled with you”1, a confession to and about two best friends who let me be a part of them when I needed to belong to people, and how they were both, in their own ways, a kind of first love for me. We were friends for about 4 years. We have not been friends for 14. But my heart still flutters when I think of them at that time, and I long to hold onto the moment the three of us laid out on a blanket under the stars and I was blessed to have the middle.
Before all of that, I wanted to live in Neverland. And before Neverland, I wanted to be a Charmed One. And before Charmed, I wanted to Blue Skidoo my way into the television, because even at 5 years old there was something to yearn for.
And I’m sorry that there are approximately three or four ideas in here, sewn together like mismatched patches to make some kind of semi-functional quilt of a letter, but really it all boils down to looking backwards.
Not with regret, to be clear—never that—but with a desire for experience, for reality, for knowing something you can never know and being known in return.
I have never been one for worrying about legacies, but I hope hundreds of years from now I am still known, in some small measure, by the trees I witnessed, and greetings scribbled onto desk corners, and the first few exhilarating steps from wet sand to endless, perfect Pacific.
Always,
Becca
“I am the yellow-bellied dolphin lost
somewhere between St. Louis and now
who waits for the girl of the future.”2
letters to kepler 