I am older now than I was the last time I checked.
I know because
my mirrors seem to reflect maturity
in the way I’ve always anticipated.
My hair dark,
face spotted by the sun,
lips full.
The strawberry blonde baby
with an overactive imagination
is lost, living somewhere deep within.
Watching, prideful.
All too mature a child,
I have grown up
and into my own mind.
The adult abilities for which I always yearned,
which were only within my grasp when I reached for boxes of costumes
and played dress up,
have finally been bestowed upon me
like a crown on my head.
I would have accepted them with open arms a decade ago—
before I knew the growing pains.
Before I could swallow and stomach the years.
But after all those years of careful calculation,
sweet dreams
and superfluous preparation,
I failed to see how soon
I’d finally reap the reward,
finally get the gift of meeting the girl
I could only ever imagine:
The girl who drives a white car
and covered her walls in rock posters
and lives in a city—
the girl who loves her friends
and loves learning.
It is her who I have nurtured,
the possibility of her which I have fawned over,
the idea of her that I have worshiped
and loved
since I first imagined she could exist.
Sometimes, now,
living feels like make-believe,
like dress up,
with my own adult body the costume.
Like I am privileged to play the part of the woman
I have always looked up to, but never knew.
I get to speak as her,
and dress her
and move her—
she is who I’ve always been ready to meet,
but never felt myself growing into.
Somewhere between then and now,
the passage of time must have distracted me.
I was always forgetting to look up.
Somehow, I forgot that
someday
I would be the very object of all my young desires,
until I finally remembered to look up
and there I saw her
staring back at me.