by. Autumn Oldaker Dear Younger Autumn, It’s okay to like girls even though your Pastor says it’s a sin. How could you not like them? Their hair smells like lilacs and their skin feels like a rabbit’s fur. Your first kiss will be with a girl while the Pastor preaches; you will sneak off and hide behind the bleachers. Her lips will touch your braces and your bottom lip. She makes you feel like undercooked chicken as she runs from you. Do not turn away from women because of what anyone says; you love who you want to love whether it be a man or a woman. When your sister takes you to the store and offers to buy you a thong, don't wear it. Boys may like it, but it causes you to have urinary tract infections and and yeast infections. You should wear cotton underwear because a healthy vagina is better than a thong up your ass. Boys wear boxers with holes scattered around them like a meerkat burrow, so you wear that underwear like you are on the catwalk. Your period will be like Pompeii. The cramps are bruises. It makes you sick like the flu on steroids. The doctors diagnose you with Endometriosis and you feel nails clawing in your vagina. The doctors won't let you have surgery till you are twenty-five because “you might want kids.” Men will throw you around like a dog with a ball in its mouth. Women will break you like the glass snowman you knocked over when you were five. You can't put the ball or the snowman back together or the snowman. You fix the pieces with glue and throw trash away like the man who kicked you around. Your relationship with your mom is an icy mountain, but you have a mom. She drives you to school, your job when you do not have a car. She holds your hair back when you're throwing up chunks of lasagna. You will see your mom’s best friend lay in a casket and be put into the ground. All those fights with your mom become short like an intermission at a play. High school classmates die in car crashes. Sometimes you think that could be me. Babies like your nephew are born. One way you describe happiness is by holding your nephew for the first time. Don't give up when you remember how the bruises feel because your nephew is waiting for you to hold him. Sincerely, Your Older Self
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