Yours in the Meanwhile

Dear God,

I am mailing you this letter even though your address is “Tomorrow.” I am mailing it in a bottle made of all the milestones I have missed. If it reaches you, water it. And please please let it grow into an acceptable form.

My name is Maria. I was born with a second spine made of lightning. The doctors didn’t chart it, but my mother felt it when she held me — said I vibrated like a hummingbird in her arms.

By age six, I had read the entire town library. The librarian, Mrs. Alvez, stopped stamping my cards. “Some books are not for children,” she said. But it wasn’t the books. It was me. I asked why the Dewey Decimal System didn’t have a number for —“the questions that eat you from the inside.”

She told me to go outside and play. Outside, the other children played tag. I played “tag the reason the universe exists.” No one wanted to be “It.”

By sixteen, I solved the calculus exam before the teacher finished writing it on the board. He didn’t give me an A. He gave me detention for “disrupting the order of learning.” I learned then: Exceptional is not the same as acceptable. Exceptional is a splinter. People work it out with tweezers, or they build calluses around it.

So I began sanding my edges.

At twenty, I got accepted to three universities and one circus. The circus wanted me to be their “Human Calculator.” They said I could wear sequins and multiply four-digit numbers while riding an elephant. It was the closest anyone had come to understanding. I chose the university. I majored in psychological Architecture because I wanted to build rooms big enough for my thoughts to flow as “objectified matters.”My advisor told me to “pick a practical specialization.” I designed a city where grief had its own plumbing. I got a C+. “Too abstract,” he wrote. “Stick to parking garages.”

I tried.

At twenty-eight, I married Peesh. He loved me in the way people love comets — from a distance, with wonder, and with the quiet relief that they don’t land in the backyard. He said, “You think in 4D, Maria. I live in a studio apartment.” We kindly agreed to disagree. The papers said “irreconcilable differences.” The truth was “irreconcilable dimensions.”

My lightning spine kept growing. It attracted storms. Ideas struck me at 3 AM — whole theorems, whole symphonies, whole languages for plants. I’d write them down, fevered, certain this was the one. By morning, the world had requirements. “Monetize it.” “Peer-review it.” “Make it fit in a 30-second reel.” So I’d file it in the Cabinet of Almosts. The Cabinet has its own weather system now. It rains in there on Tuesdays.

I started and stopped:

A school for children who dream in geometry. Unfinished — the board wanted “standardized outcomes.”

A company that translated whale song into earthquake warnings. Unfinished — the investors wanted “a Q3 exit.”

A book called How to Hold Infinity Without Breaking Your Wrists. Unfinished — I broke my wrists trying to type the last chapter.

Each time, the world sent a form to fill out. Each time, I was the wrong shape.

My uniqueness became a toll booth. Every road to “acceptable” had a gate, and the gate was shaped like other people. I could have chopped off pieces to fit. Many times, I tried. I met people who liked me “when I wasn’t talking about that stuff.” I took jobs where I dumbed myself down to a slow, safe hum.

The handicap was this: I could see the finished world. I lived there already, in the apartment between minutes. I could walk its streets, smell its bread, hear its music. But the bridge between here and there? It only appeared when I wasn’t looking. When I turned to point it out to someone — poof. I was just a woman pointing at air.

They called it delusions of grandeur. I called it homesickness.

So I learned to numb. To me, Netflix is a country with no clocks. Wine is a river that runs backward. Instagram is a hall of mirrors where everyone is finishing things except you. I redecorated my life every six months. New city. New hair. New job plan. It was all interior design for a house I never imagined to live in.

The life never came together. Not because I didn’t try. Because the trying broke on the rocks of timing and translation. I was born with the vocabulary of “Tomorrow,” and had to spend my whole life taking meetings in the “Yesterday.” But then again I thought : Is there anything like “that” at all or was it all an object of my imagination.

At forty-two, the doctors found a storm cloud in my lung. They gave it a Latin name and a timeline. Six months. Maybe eight.

I didn’t cry. I laughed. Finally, a deadline I could not miss.

So here is what I would have said, if I’d shared my thoughts before the last few minutes:

My brain was not the gift. My refusal to amputate it was. The world wanted me smaller. I wanted the world bigger. We could not agree on the terms.

I was not afraid of failure. I was afraid of succeeding at the wrong life. And so I chose no life. The unfinished one was purer. It couldn’t be taken from me, graded, or sold.

The thing that held me back was not me. It was the gap. The gap between what I was and what was allowed in places which had their own ground “rules .” I spent my life trying to stretch myself across it. I was tired. The gap won.

If you are like me, God, don’t send us with lightning spines into villages that only have use for plow horses. Or if You do, send us in pairs. So we can see each other. So we don’t think we’re broken.

I am at the end now. The hospice nurse says I’m “resting comfortably.” She doesn’t know I’m renting 3:14 AM again. The walls are thinner here. I can hear the city I never built. It sounds like bells.

I’m putting this letter in the bottle of missed milestones. First steps I never took. Marriages I never consented to. Books I never let myself finish because “who am I to say this or that ?!” Awards I never won because I never submitted. A daughter I never had because I was afraid she’d inherit the lightning and the exile of living a half lived life in a “no-man’s land.” So I sent her away to a different place where my “kismet,” would not influence her own making.

Water me, God. Let it grow into an acceptable form.

Not for me. For the next Maria. Let her be born in a century that has a word for her. Let her be born where “too much” is a volume, not a verdict. Let her finish.

As for me — my spirit has flown away at the wake of dawn . She was wearing a red coat. She said she was going to war without me, again. But it’s okay.

Tell her I’m home now.

Tell her the house is unfinished, but the door is open. And the light? The light finally fits.

Yours in the Meanwhile,

Maria