I’m not sure what day it was, or even what year. All I know is that the sweet and sticky Tennessee summers of childish freedom and endless hours of fun didn’t taste the same anymore. The privileges of adulthood, always just beyond the reach of my fingertips, were finally surrounding me, and they were terrifying.
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My dreams were always locked away behind the comfortable shroud of “growing up.” I would get to them, one day, and all the pieces of my life’s puzzle would land exactly as they were meant to. And yet, strangely enough, I never thought anything would really change.
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My siblings and I would get married (to perfect, handsome men with lots of money, of course) but all live close by, quickly having children who could grow up as best friends. Speaking of friends, I was going to have plenty of time to spend with all of my friends, and we would only grow closer and never farther apart. In the midst of this perfect, picket-fence life I would be traveling the world, wildly popular, an author and musician and actress and possibly even the president, because anything is possible when you’re thirteen and haven’t felt the cold slap of the real world on your skin.
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And it was always like this. Year after year after year, my friends and I adding to our dreams like plastic beads to a necklace.
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Until one summer, the necklace broke.
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I looked around and realized that I was no longer a girl, but a woman, and one hopelessly ill-suited for adulthood at that. People grew up and moved away, finding themselves in places neither of us had imagined. Some tasted love and lost it, others found it, and some of us never even got close. Try as we might to keep a tight grip on the threads of friendship binding us together, the world pulled us in so many different directions that my head spun trying to see everyone in the fractaling world. Our worldviews, once so closely interwoven that you couldn’t pick them apart, separated as we gained new friends and experiences that changed our points of views. It was strange. It was jarring. It was exciting.
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It was heartbreaking.
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What happened to the little girls making flower crowns out of the weeds and dandelions in my backyard? What happened to the road I used to walk up every week to visit my neighbor and read middle grade fantasy books for hours on end? What happened to the cliques and clubs, the dual weddings we planned, the thrill of driving our own cars across the states to see everything the world had to offer? (In this reality, problems such as gas money and getting kidnapped didn’t exist)
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Was it the same summer, or did it happen in clusters, our life experiences waking us up one at a time rather than as a whole? Did I miss it when it happened to my friends?
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I’ll never know, but as I’m writing this on the day before I turn twenty-one, I can’t help but feel pride as well as melancholy lamentation that comes with struggling to say good-bye.
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Somewhere, in the midst of failed dates and unrequited love, between the edges of loss and longing, in the bemoaning over how hard it is to afford things these days, somewhere around the pain of losing pets and friends and family to the Other Side, under the terror of driving the interstate for the first time or walking into a job interview with tremors in our hands, we are still those children with big dreams and bigger hearts.
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We lose some friends because that’s just how things are and then gain new ones that we never would have acknowledged in our youth.
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Our thoughts become deeper, our gratitude more intense, because we realize how easily what we love can be taken from us.
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Silence and boredom, once our greatest enemies, are now our friends, because the world is so, so loud, and we’re all craving a moment of peace.
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We find ourselves infused with a love of learning that we didn’t have before, the drive to become smarter, stronger, braver, honoring the children inside of us who wanted to go oh so far.
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We live, fall, trip over our feet and our words, crawl back up with reddened faces and a self-deprecating sigh, knowing that we have no choice but to try again until we get it right, even if we’re full of nothing but terror and the belief that we’re never going to amount to anything.
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I don’t like change. But I continue to dream and work toward another, distant summer, sticky-sweet in the mountains of Tennessee, where my own daughters are making flower chains in the backyard and creating impossible dreams with their best friends. Where, just for a little while, they are only children, adding to their necklaces with all the beads I can give them.