By Celina Tang

Edited by Jessica Yi and Alloe Mak

It’s strange how childhood feels like forever—then suddenly you’re eighteen and you can only sit by and watch as the sand trickles through and piles up at the bottom of your hourglass.

It feels like I was 11 just yesterday, waking up to my Tiffany blue walls and flower-printed bedsheets. It feels like just yesterday my bed was cluttered with an endless pile of stuffed animals. Just yesterday, I would wake up with my crappy old iPad in its pink fold-over case—fingerprints smothering the screen from a late-night Youtube rabbit hole. 

I miss the saccharine smell of the wind as it trickled through my open window while I slept; as the birds cooed me awake with their melodic chirps; and as the cicadas sang me to bed. I will never be six years old again, where no one exists but my mom and I as she recites my favorite bedtime story. She doesn’t know I’m only pretending to sleep, silently wishing for her to keep reading. I wish to meet the world with the same naive curiosity I once possessed; learn how to ride a bike with determined resilience; fall off my skateboard while skinning my knees with laughter. 

I yearn endlessly for this feeling—so elusive and foreign yet so specific and pinpoint. I grieve it. It has escaped me—slipped right through my fingertips. I coax my younger self from a distant grave. I wish the wisdom that comes with growing older does strip me of my innocence. How can I exist in these two worlds simultaneously?

It is not as easy as saying goodbye—she lives inside me still, but only as a daydream. 

Every now and then I catch a whiff of nostalgia in the cool spring air and reminisce about all the years I’ve spent in my house. I wonder how many birthdays this house has seen. How many celebrations, Christmases, and New Year’s? How many dances have been danced in this house? How many nights of drunk stumbling and howling laughter? How many heartbreaks filled with shy intimacy? 

One day my parents will move out of this place and a new family will move in. A new family with a child who will grow up and witness all the idiosyncrasies I did. Maybe they will share my somber prospects as they approach the inevitable dread of college applications. 

Time will wither me as it withers all else. The house will change and so will I. They will replace the front steps that my dad worked so hard to renovate, and maybe they’ll tear down the old fireplace I spent so many nights with. My skin will shed and I’ll become brand new. My fingers will become strangers to the tattered bricks and crooked fences that line the garden. How can I immortalize myself so I won’t forget? 

I’m scared to grow old, for these memories to dissipate forever. The burden of the future haunts me prematurely.

Soon, it will no longer be my home—only becoming a mere memory of a younger time. These are the last days of my childhood. Eighteen years doesn’t seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things, but it is all I know.