It will have stretched and slipped across my body until eventually it tightens itself around the curves of my hips and the shape of my breasts, and my hair flattens enough to be called beautiful.

I’ll be alone, stretching through that moment in a fight against myself and lethargy. I’ll be happy, I’m sure, and will reflect on this time now with nothing more than curious apathy. After all, the me of then would not be worried about the me of now.

Maybe you’ll be by my side.

I’m hoping you won’t.

Are you the reason I can’t fit myself yet? If I were alone, surely, I would be the woman I envisioned I’d be. Alone. Happy. The correlation seems quite clear to me now.

My mother will pat my hair and tell me everything is alright; there’s no rush to become yourself. She doesn’t understand the consequences of skin that doesn’t fit. Of course, she’s always fit hers. There’s not a moment where she has been unsure of herself. She doesn’t doubt her reliance on another, my reliance on you.

Should a girl—a woman—fit herself from the moment she is born, or does she grow into it? Is sixteen the age? Or twenty? Or thirty-two? I suppose that time decides when I will or won’t fit myself. I am but a small girl in a woman’s body, never quite satisfied with the current me. There’s a version of me that’s always better. Fitter. Smarter. Happier.

I’ll be walking down the street one day and realise I left part of myself behind. I lost it somewhere unknown. I had even forgotten that I used to have it; that it used to be a part of me before I found you. And then I’ll realise. I’ll look back and ask myself where that person, that me, had gone, and why she left.

It would have been all my fault—the me of now, of course. The me of then, the possible me, the desired me, she couldn’t be at fault. She was non-existent, yet definitively tangible. The choices I made, those I make now, they affect her; they affect my ability to fit her.

She blames me already for not being able to become her so quickly. For being unable to provide her with the being she should have been. I say sorry to the me of my mind. That possible, future self. She’ll take my apology with a disappointed glare and whisper words of passive-aggressive encouragement in my ears: study more, eat less, work out.

My mother will tell me that life is a journey and that we all need time to become ourselves. I’ll believe her and ask for her story. She’ll tell me, her skin loose. I’ll breathe in time to the voice of the woman hadn’t fit herself either, until eventually my tendons snap and I realise, with you, I’ll never be the woman I will.