I did a guided meditation last night in a meeting that was like–visualize your younger self sitting knee to knee with you.

I was fully planning on visualizing myself in active addiction, shivering denizen of battery acid brain space, beautiful and thin and all too disgusting to love. I was really planning some poetic reunification, some past self forgiveness, some lovin of my worst self.

Imagine my surprise when instead, I open my visualizing eye and see her: fat bowl cut nerd with a large binder of printed out Star Trek fanfiction.

“What,” i visualized at her, “the fuck are you doing here?”

She licked a finger and flipped a page, barely glancing at me up through stubby blonde eyelashes.

“I wasn’t expecting…” I started, and then didn’t say, to have to forgive YOU today.

Nothing, nada, zilch. There is nothing in the real world to interest her.

“You know,” I at this point announced, feeling more than awkward in the face of my own disdain, “William Shatner recently went to space and he was like, not about it. Was just like–bring me home, I hate this. Everyone and everything I love is on Earth. We have to take care of that place, not colonize the stars.”

Nothing.

“Bitch that’s FASCINATING!” I shout.

Start to come back to center~

The sultry slightly transatlantic voice of the guided meditation yanks my string and a bop back down like an obedient balloon. She is gone.

“Wait,” I visualize a whisper sliding through the scales of time to her, “What I wanted to say was… I know you’re doing your best.”