What is it that makes me so melancholy when my life is so full? Do I miss the sweetness of my life for longing for the one thing that it lacks? Do I forget the pleasures of today pining for the treasures of tomorrow?
I have spent too many years in tomorrow, I know not if I can regain the todays I have. Years of longing dreaming, making dates and never keeping them. I was to have a house by 25, I knew it inside. But my todays never matched my dream of tomorrow, and now that is only a false hope. And the todays I lived got lost in the plans for tomorrow so that I do not know whether I have succeeded or failed. I can list my activities but cannot list my accomplishments, for everything I have done has fallen short of its intention. How can I regain today with pure hope for tomorrow?
Fallen, dismayed, dashed, diseased. And I become an old maid, not out of age but out of loss. For an old maid is only a woman who feels only the losses of yesterday and none of the future of today. I mourn the setting aside of my little girl dresses, but instead of taking up the gay young woman’s garb, I settle down to widow’s weeds. I act as if I had lost my life, when I have only just begun. If life is beads upon a chain, my first twenty have been forgotten while dreaming of the ones that would come.
But I will not remain in this state. I will only beg my Lord that He restore the years of the locust, that my life might not be unfruitful. I will only petition my Savior that He redeem my dreams. I will hold fast to my Beloved. But still my heart will ask, in peace and anguish both–I beg You, my Lord, a letter. A letter I might open with “Dearest friend” and close “Ever, affectionately yours.”