Little Souls

Originally published on October 22nd, 2019

It always happens before my birthday. I spend time being excited about getting a little bit older, and then I stumble upon a picture, or old song, or old journal and I get more nostalgic than usual. This time it happened as I was looking at MFA programs (as I do sometimes), and realized the earliest I could apply for grad school is in only a few years. That’s when the whole “oh my, I’m twenty in only a couple weeks” thing hit like a ton of bricks. This morning I also found this picture, which was taken a little over ten years ago, in September of 2009. This would have been taken a couple months before I was standing in front of a mirror one night in a ballerina printed nightgown brushing my hair while thinking of how I never wanted to grow up. How I wanted to stay little and ten forever.

Yesterday, I was talking with a girl who just turned ten a couple weeks ago. A friend who was with us asked me if I’d ever want to go back to being ten, and I laughed slightly and quietly said no. I’m nostalgic today, yes, but I know that I would never want to go back to being the ten year old with the ballerina nightgown, the twelve year old with story-filled notebooks, or the seventeen year old memorizing Shakespeare monologues for fun. But those little souls, those younger me’s, are still around. They’re still walking me home, into this next decade.