(As must happen at least once every year, I was reading the old posts, feeling nostalgic, and thinking.)
I think you're a different person every second, every shift. I've been a million people before, each in its own turn embodied, explored, discarded. Seemingly gone. As I read, thoug, I feel as if I'm slipping back into those old skins, one by one. Becoming those old selves again, but in acceleration.
The best, or worst, thing about doing that is that I can feel the changes of my heart as time passed and things came. I can feel my hopes dying one by one. My smile twisting a little with doubt, every week, every day.
It seems so sad, watching the transition of my words, and the transformation of life that that suggests. The shift from guile to cold realisation, from ignorance to understanding--then: the way I could exalt everything I loved in the slightest, to now: how I never even speak of the joys now, always lamenting. I used to cheer at the onset of March holidays. Revel in the thought of playing basketball. Look at a terrible self-written story and believe it was excellent.
Where has it gone? Where has it flown? I'll never have it back, isn't that so? Things change too fast, faster than I can even begin to see, like a fluttering shadow that vanishes around the corner of a skyscraper.
Now I know why the innocence of childhood is one of the most tragic, most precious things in the world. When I was twelve, I swore I'd never let that instant wonder, that certain joy, go. I swore I'd never be like those 'emo teenagers' who hated the world and hated their parents and hated running through parks and tasting the air.
But that's precisely what I am now, isn't it? Cooped up in a corner whenever I'm at home. Afraid of the sun, almost. It drained out of me. Life changed me; life taught me. Maybe it was peer pressure or expectation. I morphed to suit the image they pictured of me.
But it's done, and I let a treasure go without a second thought. This is the pain of remembering. Just like how, as a child, I used to gaze upwards through that frosted lens in the ceiling, and wonder what the future I didn't yet know existed there--I'm gazing backwards at those times, like a passer-by through the façade of an antique shop...
As I read, I'm looking back upon myself, me with those wide and ready and earnest eyes. I'm watching someone who doesn't know what to expect. Me before the voyage began. I'm looking at a child who knew she'd look back someday, who decided there and then to keep a record of her 'now' for her future self. For me.
We're the same person, but that's so hard to believe. I look like an airheaded fangirl there. I'm the other extreme now. It awes me, how such transformations happen. It really does. I'm not sure if it should sadden me, but sadden me it does. All the same.
