catapult magazine

My 13-year-old Little Woman Speaks to 23-year-old Me on Another Halloween

by Amanda Caldwell

Do you envy more my thrift-store find for my literary costume:
rose lace bodice with ladylike straps,
ankle-brushing skirt and short jacket,
covered buttons threaded coyly through loops —
or the fact that I can still close the buttons and zip the dress,
skinny-hipped and girlish beneath? But you're cooler now,
aren't you? At 23, aren't you in your rosy years, full-bloomed,
grown-up but not adult?
While I've got my anachronistic metal-braced smile,
looking through my pink-plastic schoolgirl glasses,
my awkward eagerness to taste life advertised
in this snapshot on my best friend's front porch.

I bring you a treat in my Halloween basket,
tucked inside the wicker that matches my old-fashioned look.
I've carried it with me, even tonight,
composing a letter to finish and save, 13 to 23.
You're finally old enough to read it. You can find it
caught within the sticky weave,
lined paper still crisp and ballpoint ink a novelty green,
faintly scented with apples.
But finishing will take a few more nights. Writing
and rewriting again is not yet a chore.

The point isn't if you've accomplished what I ask in this letter,
if you've climbed the Alpine Path,
if you've written one novel, a dozen, or none,
if you've found the man of your dreams with a baby to come,
if you've grown and changed and achieved.
It doesn't matter to me,
because I am much nicer to you at 13 than you are to yourself now;
I ask much less and hope much more.
This letter you are afraid to read
is a love letter,
a dreamy brightness for who you will become,
and a like-like giddiness toward God,
a confidence in his continued rapture with you.

And who are you now?
Consider how far off you are from me, and my best friend here,
in our three-dollar evening gowns and real-fur hand-me-down capes,
our hair in pinned-up French braids, our baskets caught delicately by
one hand in transparent glove from East Berlin, paper fan in the other,
with painted Chinese girls and sticks as thin as leaves.
And before our containers hold even one wrapped delight,
we anticipate the Starbursts and Kit-Kats and Tootsie Rolls
and, yes, the tracts and black licorice and Chubbies, too.
Because we take it all, and we eat everything or we throw it away.

Cynicism hasn't helped you. The trick is to savor your life,
the way you used to save candy almost to the next Halloween.