The attic air hung thick with dust and the scent of forgotten summers. Eleanor, sweat beading on her forehead, sifted through a trunk crammed with relics from her adolescence. A faded photograph of her teenage self, clutching a guitar, a stack of love letters, and then, tucked beneath a chipped teacup, a folded piece of stationery. It was a letter, penned in her own frantic handwriting, to her mother. She unfolded it, the paper brittle and yellowed. The words, filled with demands for more, for better, for everything, burned like acid in her memory. Her jaw clenched.
She read the words she'd written. "I deserve…" The sentence stopped her. The letter was a litany of wants, a shopping list of desires. A simmering feeling spread through her chest. She remembered wanting a pony. She remembered wanting a specific bike. All the things she felt entitled to. She reread the words, now with a cold, almost detached curiosity.
The words were an embarrassment. That sense of entitlement, that feeling of being owed, it was all there in black and white. Yet, a strange, prickling anticipation rose within her. It was as if she could, by rereading her younger self's demands, somehow relive them. She ran her fingers across the paper, tracing the angry slashes of her signature. It was a younger version of her, a version who took and took without a thought for consequences.