I met my younger self for coffee today | Lyric Essay

Inspired by Jennae Cecelia's poem in her book 'deep in my feels'. A reflective lyric essay on some time with my younger self who most people don't believe exists.

Feb 25, 2025

2 people sitting on chair near window during sunset

I met with my younger self for coffee today. He arrived five minutes early, and so did I. We slipped into the coffee shop, where the baristas hissed steam into milk and the grinders groaned, a symphony of modern necessity that he finds unsettling, but I hardly notice anymore.

He wore faded white classic Reeboks and a blue Fred Perry tracksuit, with a short back and sides haircut smothered with wet hair gel. A uniform of a youth in search of identity. I wore a red cashmere jumper with blue Levis and black New Balance trainers, with a slightly longer haircut with hair clay to style the fringe to the side so it didn’t impede my Rayban glasses, mine a uniform more suited for this place.

He ordered a hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows, and so did I. Our spoons danced a skittered ballet, slicing through the cream as we raced to plop the marshmallows in the hot milk to melt. I tell him we live in the UK now. His body stiffens while avoiding eye contact. I forgot his wariness around adults, especially in settings like this, the usual stage for social workers to forage for secrets to be held against us. I hear him reply,

“What, across? I wouldn’t want to move so far away.”

Show me your fingertips, I asked him. Grooved callouses were forming on his fingers from all the hours of guitar practice. I showed him mine.

“Do you remember what Jimmy Gillespie told us when we first started playing the guitar?”

He said, “Yeah, that if you can play an instrument, you’ll always travel and make money.” I told him it was not about money. It was a window to a world that would eventually give him an escape route out of this life.

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He wondered if we ever find a way to stop using drugs.

“We do,” I reply, “one day. It gets worse first, but you need to get there to stick to your choices.” He exhales a fragile sigh that I feel in my own lungs. I want to reach over and hold him for a moment, tell him I’m sorry for every self-destructive path I led him down. But I don’t. He doesn’t need my guilt, just a promise that the chaos ends.

“Do we ever go to prison?” he asks, almost bracing himself in a fragile quiet. “No,” I say, “but almost”. His guarded eyes widened as I told him we eventually met a caregiver with care to give. I told him we relapsed into the same criminal behaviour we did before we found music, and despite having her family, her ex-husband, her work colleagues, her friends, our social worker all telling her to send us back to the Isle of Man, she says no, and that she’ll say that she refuses to because every adult before her had let us down and she was going to be the first one not to. I told him she’ll go to the sentencing hearing, and the judge will see her sitting beside us, beside me, beside him, and says he intended to send us to prison, but if the victim of our crimes will forgive us and support us on this day, then he could not send us to prison. We still call her every single day, I added.

Half-melted pink clouds started to merge into one as they sat on top of our hot chocolates. We each scooped the gloop into our mouths before stirring the remaining pink edges, curling into the dark as they dissipated into the chocolate. He asked if we ever find a place we call home.

“I don’t know yet,” I replied, “every relationship on every level still feels transactional, although everyone around me would disagree. People only like me because of my work, not because of who I am.” I told him I don’t know if I’ll be able to experience it in any other way, but I’m still figuring it out. He asked me why I care so much about how or why people like me and said I should be grateful that people like me all because everyone currently writes him off.

“Do we get a proper job?” he asked. I told him we turn our lives around and find a job we love. One where it didn’t matter that we grew up in children’s homes or were young offenders or could not read yet, and the only thing that mattered was how hard we tried. I went on to tell him that the busyness was a blessing because we’re so busy we won’t have time to think about our childhood or deal with it. He said that doesn’t sound fun, and he probably wouldn’t love that. And that I should learn to forgive but not forget.

“It’s the closest thing to home,” I added, “every time I enter the heavy doors of a recording studio, it doesn’t matter how tired, run-down, angry, or stressed, whatever problem I have, hearing the hum of equipment or the smell of air-conditioned air, makes it all fall away, and leaves us three inches taller”. He can’t believe I actually managed to turn his hobby into a job and whispers to himself, I’m so glad I stuck it out.

Our spoons clinked on the bottom of the glass mugs. The hisses and groans faded down to an aroma of baked goods and the clattering of dirty cups. It occurred to me I was living a life he didn’t know existed yet, and I had blocked out his. He tells me I shouldn’t worry too much about him and focus on getting us where we want to be. I asked him if he ever worried about me. He asked me if I remembered the fortune cookie we got on the last day of primary school. I said yes. It said that I would never grow old because of my personality. He said, “Exactly, so I don’t need to worry”.

He got up to leave, scraping his chair across the floor as he pushed it back under the table, and so did I. He exchanged a wave because he’s not conformable with physical contact, and so did I. It will be years before we meet again. Still, every time he now meets a brick wall because people from the care system don’t really exist in the creative industries, he knows all the resilience we have built up will help see us through. I wondered what we would talk about next time or whether it would still be a hot chocolate. He popped in his headphones, and so did I.

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