A dream
Once, a distant dream my father had about a little girl with long and curling black hair. Then, an unintended reality, dusted with playground wood chips, drinking dyed-green milk for Saint Patrick’s day, she is coating her preschool cubby with stickers peeled by sticky fingers from mealy red delicious apples. Elementary school was a flash of bright red and yellow scholastic book fairs; fresh rubber erasers and plasticky scratch n’ sniff brownie bookmarks. Third grade mesmerized me with a whirl of first crushes and color changing pencils. Polished rocks clacked together, contained by small velvet pouches. Elementary school was a place where lost teeth were revered objects. Single gummy bears could motivate tens of children to learn to bowl, observing their ball send a full set of war-torn, once-white plastic bowling pins to scatter across the aisle. Strike! Sliding across the gym floor on a bright purple scooter, my hair, drug through dust and rocks, twists into knots. My tummy is sore from pushing against the sharp edges of the plastic scooter, I still feel like wonder woman remembering it.
Junior high lost the mystique of field day refrigerator box-rolls; the cardboard and cut grass scented glee of tumbling over your three best friends on the way down the kindergarten mountainside. Junior high dented my relentless positivity. It kicked the shy naivety out of harmless crushes excitedly relayed to one too many avid gossipers, leaving me breathless and alone with too many dreams, and too little time. When I was little, “growing up” was romanticized as the only thing that big girls could do. Now, “growing up” is a slap across the face, a sharp sting thrown around by classmates, letting you know that “real life” is just around the corner. I wish for kindergarten bug hunts, and field trips to the arboretum. Mostly, I miss the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I miss how it wasn’t judged by prospective income, but by passion. The important part was the mystified glow in the eyes of small children, not yet taught to fear the “real world.”
High school taught me that the time for dreams was not now, maybe never. There are too many important things to be done in the “real world.” No, I can’t read outside of class anymore, there’s no time at all. So devoted to the future that I sometimes give up my now. Here’s to hoping it might come soaring back to me when this is all over. It won’t, but high school says this will still be the peak of my life. I don’t believe it. How can I love something I barely had the energy to experience?
In the future, maybe by ten years, hopefully sooner, I hope to be enjoying each day as if it were a kindergarten box-roll. Hopeful as a naive fifth grader, wishing for shared birthday cupcakes, and popcorn fridays. I want to be as willing to learn as a first grader enthusiastically playing the tambourine. To explore like a second grader, running through the forest, quickly drawing maps of the wilderness, unbothered by the mud squelching in her plain blue crocs. I want to live to learn from each day; To love myself like the girl wearing pink fuzzy sweatpants with pink metallic cowgirl boots in her third grade yearbook. My dream is not to simply grow up, and be successful. My future is a dream that keeps changing each day, only to be chased after like a soap bubble swept across the cedar-filled breeze.
By Lark Wylder
