By Rebekah Bailey, Staff Writer, Emerson College
Dear Rachel,
You’re a little more than a year away from college, and I am terrified.
You’re my little sister: I think I get to be a little scared of you growing up, becoming your own person, going to college, graduate school (med school, little sister? really?), having a family. Getting old. Getting hurt.
I am so terrified of what may happen to you in college.
Dad texts me and tells me about the large state universities you like, with thirty-floor dorms and lecture classes of more than a hundred. You’re not going to be special there, just like I’m not special in this city of over half a million. But even if the professors never remember your name, know that I will always, and that I will always be terrified for you.
I am a sixteen-hour drive away or a six hundred dollar flight away, but if I ever get that call the call that's more terrifying than any threat from Boston, or the world, or nuclear warfare—know that I will get there.
I wish I didn’t have to be scared for you, and I wish I didn’t have to worry. But you’re a (occasionally naïve) girl of barely seventeen, and soon you’ll be where I can’t protect you. I’ve never been that disconnected from you, even here.
I don’t ever want to get the call that says someone has hurt you: that your boyfriend broke up with you, that a professor failed you because he doesn’t like your eyeliner, that your best friend of seven years stopped talking to you. But call me.
I am terrified of the call that says someone has laid a hand on you, that something was slipped into your drink, that he didn’t listen when you said “no”, that the police didn’t believe you. I am terrified that you will call me asking about abortion clinics in Lexington because you can’t be a mother yet. But call me.
Even if you can’t call our parents (because sometimes you can’t), call me. I am terrified for you because I love you more than possibly anything else in this whole damned world, because you’re the most precious thing I know. Because it’s my job to keep you safe, and when I can’t, to help you pick up the pieces. I’ll empty my bank account, my scholarships, my veins, to keep you safe. You have to know that—even when you were a kid and upset by the drawings your classmates made of your pudgy body, I protected you, and I will for the rest of your life (whether you want it or not, so suck it up).
Call me.
P.S. I love you.
Rebekah Bailey is a queer, over-caffeinated Emerson College freshman WLP major from eastern Kentucky. She enjoys Stargate, violently critiquing other people’s work, procrastinating on Tumblr, and being sassy with her roommates. She has had a 5-point plan to take over the world ready since fifth grade, and had it been for math she would have become an evil genius physicist (but since math is hard, she just writes about them).
Dear Rachel,
You’re a little more than a year away from college, and I am terrified.
You’re my little sister: I think I get to be a little scared of you growing up, becoming your own person, going to college, graduate school (med school, little sister? really?), having a family. Getting old. Getting hurt.
I am so terrified of what may happen to you in college.
Dad texts me and tells me about the large state universities you like, with thirty-floor dorms and lecture classes of more than a hundred. You’re not going to be special there, just like I’m not special in this city of over half a million. But even if the professors never remember your name, know that I will always, and that I will always be terrified for you.
I am a sixteen-hour drive away or a six hundred dollar flight away, but if I ever get that call the call that's more terrifying than any threat from Boston, or the world, or nuclear warfare—know that I will get there.
I wish I didn’t have to be scared for you, and I wish I didn’t have to worry. But you’re a (occasionally naïve) girl of barely seventeen, and soon you’ll be where I can’t protect you. I’ve never been that disconnected from you, even here.
I don’t ever want to get the call that says someone has hurt you: that your boyfriend broke up with you, that a professor failed you because he doesn’t like your eyeliner, that your best friend of seven years stopped talking to you. But call me.
I am terrified of the call that says someone has laid a hand on you, that something was slipped into your drink, that he didn’t listen when you said “no”, that the police didn’t believe you. I am terrified that you will call me asking about abortion clinics in Lexington because you can’t be a mother yet. But call me.
Even if you can’t call our parents (because sometimes you can’t), call me. I am terrified for you because I love you more than possibly anything else in this whole damned world, because you’re the most precious thing I know. Because it’s my job to keep you safe, and when I can’t, to help you pick up the pieces. I’ll empty my bank account, my scholarships, my veins, to keep you safe. You have to know that—even when you were a kid and upset by the drawings your classmates made of your pudgy body, I protected you, and I will for the rest of your life (whether you want it or not, so suck it up).
Call me.
P.S. I love you.
Rebekah Bailey is a queer, over-caffeinated Emerson College freshman WLP major from eastern Kentucky. She enjoys Stargate, violently critiquing other people’s work, procrastinating on Tumblr, and being sassy with her roommates. She has had a 5-point plan to take over the world ready since fifth grade, and had it been for math she would have become an evil genius physicist (but since math is hard, she just writes about them).