Back in 2012, I wrote a prayer:
I don’t ask for much,
a small alley,
a tree with lush foliage,
a cigarette burned to its end and its glow.
Please give me a moon,
let it turn to scattered silver
on the river’s surface, tenderly kissing the riverbank with the flowing water.
Please give me a brand new evening in early summer,
a light turned on in an unfamiliar room.
Young people’s arguments,
whispers, and laughter on the street.
Please give me a wisp of light purple mist, rising slowly at midnight.
Give me something moving, something that one can carefully ponder
Just a little.
Just give me a little poetry.
And then I will be able endure everything that follows.
All the days without beauty
And in 2025, I wrote back:
Dear Younger Me
It moves me to read these words from you, to trace the outline of a longing I’ve carried with me all these years. In your quiet request for beauty, I recognise the compass that has guided me, even when I thought I was lost.
You asked for modest gifts: an alley, a tree, the glow of a dying cigarette. You didn’t demand grand vistas or spectacular revelations—just fragments of beauty to sustain you through barren days. What you couldn’t have known then was how this gentle manifesto would shape a life.
I want to tell you something important: those requests weren’t just poetic fancies. They were expressions of your deepest nature, already understanding what would nourish you. While others might have asked for achievement or passion or certainty, you asked for light on water, for purple mist at midnight, for the sound of strangers living their lives on distant streets.
Here is what surprises me most about the journey from you to me: I stopped waiting to be given these moments. I learned to create them. The passive voice of your plea—“please give me”—has evolved into active cultivation. That transformation wasn’t immediate or easy; it required years of learning to trust my own aesthetic instincts, to believe they were not frivolous but essential.
You worried about enduring “all the days without beauty.” What I’ve discovered is that there are fewer of those days than you feared. Beauty doesn’t abandon us; we sometimes only abandon our attention to it. Even in grief, in disappointment, in routine, there is the play of light, the unexpected juxtaposition, the moment of connection.
When I tend the garden now, pruning roses that cascade over a trellis, I’m fulfilling your request for “a tree with lush foliage.” When I sit in the gathering dusk with music softening the air around me, I’m answering your plea for “a brand new evening in early summer.” The spaces I create—corners where light pools against shadow, where texture meets color—these are responses to your yearning for “something moving, something that one can carefully ponder.”
I haven’t abandoned intellect or analysis—those remain vital tools. But I’ve learned they aren’t opposed to beauty; they’re different lenses for perceiving it. The questions you asked in your philosophical writings—about isolation, connection, meaning—haven’t disappeared. They’ve just found homes in physical spaces as well as mental ones.
You once asked: “Were you alone or with others during your most profound experiences?” I can tell you now that this binary dissolves when you’re fully present. The moments of deepest beauty often exist in a space where such distinctions blur—where solitude opens itself to connection, where shared experience creates sanctuary for individual perception.
What would most surprise you, I think, is not what I’ve become but what I’ve unbecome—the shedding of the idea that beauty is something rare and fragile, to be desperately gathered against future scarcity. Beauty is abundant when you learn to participate in it rather than just witness it. It’s not just something to help you endure life; it’s a way of living itself.
The promise you made—that a little poetry would help you endure everything that follows—has revealed itself as both true and transcended. Beauty hasn’t just helped me survive the difficult days; it’s transformed my understanding of difficulty itself.
So thank you for articulating this longing, for sending this message across time. The little you asked for has become everything.
With recognition,
Your future self
