Idol Survivor: "Letters From Next Week"

[halfshellvenus]

Letters From Next Week
idol survivor | daily-fic challenge, day 14 | ~500 words

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Dear Stacy, I know how much you love those navy-blue dress pants, but listen up: DO NOT wear them to the Customer Focus Group meeting on Monday. I mean it. That zipper has had all it can take. It's standing on the ledge, and it’s going to jump. You

Comments

[passing_through]

I LOVE this!

Cute, funny, and it has a great "girlfriend advice" vibe going on.

I'm curious, does her secret include the past as well?

The idea of moving through time fascinates me. I was sitting at a red light the other day and out of the blue, I thought, "I wonder what people who lived in places like the deserts of Arizona in the 1800s would think if they knew that one day there we would be something called air conditioning and they didn't have to spend their entire lives being hot and sweaty. If they could even imagine living in a house that didn't feel hot and airless most of the time. What would they think, feeling the cool air on their bodies while the heat blazed away outside?"

I focus on the heat/AC thing a lot due to my hatred of the heat and how I don't think I would have lasted as a Prairie Woman :)

Every once in a while I'll try and imagine what it would be like if I lived in a world where the concept of "time" didn't exist. What would my life be like as I moved through days and nights and seasons without a way to mark the passage of the past. I would age and have my memories but how would I reference them without a "place marker"? "I fell off my bike when I was ten and broke my arm." would simply be, "When I was young, I fell off my bike and broke my arm.". You can still tell the story, but without a frame of reference to "when", does it all blur together?

The concept of time and my time remaining has been on my mind for the last year or so and I dwell on it too much, which leads to bouts of depression and sometimes desperation and anxiety. You get to an age where it all becomes math. It's no longer "when", it's "If". At my current age, and Katie's desire to not have children until she's a few years into her career, if I do manage to live to a decent age, it still won't be long enough to see my grandchild graduate high school. It's not being cynical or overly dramatic. It's math, pure and simple. So in this instance, not being aware of the passage of time would actually be a blessing. And being able to travel into the future would be the greatest gift of all :D

[halfshellvenus]

I focus on the heat/AC thing a lot due to my hatred of the heat and how I don't think I would have lasted as a Prairie Woman :)
I've had those thoughts before, mainly because Sacramento is such a hell-hole heatwise as well. Not as bad as Phoenix, but hardly anyplace is that bad. I cannot _imagine_ settling in this climate without A/C. Gah.

I think about time and my remaining time as well, in a slight different depressing way--and COVID really hasn't helped any of that, because it's so hard to enjoy things or remember what 'fun' felt like. Mine is more about the best parts of life being behind me, those years of college and then when I first met my husband and all of that time through when the kids were little. The next bright spot really is the grandchildren, and I worry less about my health there than my husband's.

I wish more often that I could travel to the past and revisit the good moments all over again!