after The Letter Q Project

 I am so sorry everyone deconstructs and changes your beautiful,
complicated name. The pieces of your soft “ca” and lopping “o”
rebranded into southern alternatives like Caroline or Coraline or Carol
or even Carly once, after the doctor said the only Carolyn he’d ever heard
of was his great great grandmother and she was a bitch. When you’re older,
you will spend a lot of time distancing yourself from it
and all the strange memories it holds— being both yours and not,
encircling the women of your family into a narrative both yours and not—
but it is also the name a lot of people who love you
will continue to call you in the future, with a tenderness no kiss
you’ve ever had (thus far) could ever match, and that’s no small thing. I want you
to know that, unfortunately, that awkwardness that plagues you,
your limbs, that wonderful jumbled mind, is for life, as are those fleshly,
round cheeks emblematic of Raphaelite cherubs and heroines, and your age
will be a mystery to strangers for probably your entire life and a lot
of people will still find you eccentric and wield the word ‘weird’ not as a compliment
but as a way to set you a part— and yes, this will still hurt and never stop
the feeling of isolation that follows it, but the way some people will
call you ‘creative’ and ‘funny’ will serve as retroactive angelic mind-erasers
making the former seem like just a bad dream.

I know you feel constantly on the outside of things peering in, lost in imagining
scenarios of “what if” constantly. But I’m here to tell you that the mythical ‘inside’
you so desperately want to be a part of sucks and all of those inside girls
are now nurses (god help those poor patients’ veins) and instagram health
coaches who hate their lives— secretly outside of the internet and their cults—
and years later, they will reintroduce themselves to you at parties as if
you didn’t go to the same high school and they will want to know you
and you will smile a cat’s smile and tell them to fuck off and it will be great. 
But I must also tell you, honestly, that the future will not be what you wanted
or planned for and that’s the good news, kiddo. No offense, but your vision
of older us isn’t what’s best for you and this one, with it’s idiosyncrasies and occasional
lonelinesses and terrors and feelings of thumb-on-the-pulse freedom and joy, is.
It’s harder and more like gardening— sorry little Carolyn, you, like your loving and
complicated mother, garden in the future and you’re now good at it
after a lot of dead ferns— learning to make your strong touch a bit lighter
and more tentative and tender and slow moving and tending to moments,
people, the world, and most importantly yourself
and the long hours where hard work seems to yield nothing and long hours
turned days where nothing happens at all and being alright with the waiting.
And I know how much you hate waiting for anything and this will get you
into trouble. I’d almost begin to warn you against this but I’m you
and I know it’s of no use— you’d just do it anyway. You’re so strong
and you’ll be able to take it and endure, even if I don’t want you to.
It will make you stronger; I’m just sorry you have to discover that
through pain. And there will be a lot. Your body will be the stage
for a lot of poking and prodding by doctors, by random men, by men
you know, by your mother, by friends who are not friends, and people
who do not love you and the worst person to do this will be yourself
when you refuse to listen to your wonderful insides and instead try
to make another go for a place in that mythical ‘inside’ world of people
you think have better lives than you do. (See the above part about the nurses).

 More than anything else, I’d like to tell you that at the age of ten and thirteen
and eighteen and twenty and twenty-two, even twenty-two, and all
the ages you will be after, that there is nothing wrong with you.
And that everyday you spend writing in your head and living in your
head and sometimes, if you’re lucky, writing outside your head and
living outside your head is a day that prepared you to do your life’s work,
which is to aerate stories, yours, and to make others laugh and feel
and know that what it is inside that they feel is the same as you
and the same as so many others who have all been brainwashed
into thinking they are ‘weird’ and ‘other’ and ‘wrong.’ There is something
so right with you and so wrong with the world. Please stop
trying to change yourself, little one.

 (But I will admit, 2010 you in jean skirts and peplum shirts was a
hideous choice and not for you so please stop wearing them to resemble Zoey 101
characters.)

The knowing you will experience in your twenties will confirm everything
you kind of know now. It will confirm you’re emotional and sensitive— a compliment,
thank you very much— and prone to big feelings that will carry you so far
from your body that writing it down is the only way to stay earth-side. It will
confirm how passionately you care about things so there’s no use being
embarrassed— you cannot keep it to yourself anyways. It will confirm
you’re meant to love a lot of people— so many, you will lose count.
That you love people’s souls more than bodies and that the way you look long
at people’s faces and clavicles will confirm this. It will confirm
that you’re feeling of being stuck, trapped, is because your house,
your school, your town is too small for you and you must leave it to find
the big spaces that are meant for you. And you will find it. I have so much
faith in you. Much more than you have in yourself, which makes me sad,
even now. So, as a consolation, I leave you with some advice you will take:

 Enough with the croissants— it’ll take you five years to be able to enjoy them
again, properly, you animal.

 Stop rereading the same book for that one dirty scene at the end and go
for a walk outside instead.

 Know that you’re not crazy, your family just needs weekly therapy
and mood stabilizing drugs.

 And that your heart, your tender, curious heart is always steering you
towards what is meant for you.

And it waits.

Sincerely, every version of your misspelled name
that you said nothing about, just nodded and smiled.

 Sincerely, CJ, which fits and also doesn’t, as most names
do, but a good start.  

-CJ Connolly

CJ (she, her) is a poet and writer living in Nashville, Tennessee with a degree in English and a double minor in creative writing and history. She's had work published in and forthcoming from Aurora: the Allegory Ridge Poetry Anthology, NOVUS, Salt Weekly, Sinew: Poetry in the Brew’s Poetry Anthology, and the Belmont Literary Journal. When she’s not writing about women’s lives or taking moody walks in the cold, she’s working a myriad of jobs from hanging with kids as a writing instructor, serving as a writer's assistant to a boss-turned-friend, marketing for a local literary non-profit, occasionally dog-walking, and substitute teaching, all the while working—with her fingers and toes crossed—towards an MFA in poetry one day.