I stare into the camera, waiting for my cue. In the background, a shelf displays the brightly colored toys of my childhood, rendered in the fuzzy technicolor of a 1990s video recording. Next to me, a stuffed King Kong gazes off-screen.

“Mum..ah..” The sound rises from his mouth like a bubble, lifting into the air and popping gently at my ears. He’s grinning up at me with one of those gorgeous, full-face bursts that shows off his four newly erupted pearls.

The cycle of days spent in a one-bedroom, largely rectangular rental at the triangular corner of Commonwealth and Beacon, conveniently positioned in the middle of Kenmore Square, were Happy Days (on re-run). Full of Seinfeld-inspired laughs and nights with Friends (in thirty-minute segments). Simple times woven of simple fare.

Since the library is closed to the public due to the pandemic, I have nowhere to spend my lunch hour. On rainy days, after I wolf down my peanut butter sandwich at my desk, I cut through the woods behind my office and duck into the grocery store where I try to spend forty-five minutes buying a bottle of soda. It has become increasingly difficult to not feel like I’m doing something wrong by loitering in the greeting card section pretending like I’m looking for the perfect birthday card or killing time in the least-shopped aisle–the one with a meager offering of generic packs of underwear and cotton tube socks sandwiched between a selection of dusty light bulbs and bottles of motor oil.

Summers lingered, with pancakes for breakfast and sometimes for lunch, too. Mom peeled carrots and left them in a Pyrex bowl of water on the kitchen table. I’d grab one for a snack, running through the house and out to the backyard, where the fun happened.

I love that you’re still a tomboy as you enter middle school. That you still play pickup touch football with the guys in the neighborhood and don’t care about makeup. You’re very smart, but maybe a little naïve about other people’s motivations. I’m hoping you’re old enough to receive the advice I want to give you in this letter.

Where you feel most content is the essence of who you are. The moments in life when what you are doing engulfs you, and for a second, life is simple. Find that, let it become you. Let it never be taken from you or forgotten about as life and her worries take over. Promise me that, young one.