Ella Donoghue

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.

Written by Ella Donoghue

Photography by Anna Brody

I began dancing when I was three.

Monday nights, ballet.

In the cold and stuffy backroom of some sad strip mall office,

where the ceilings were tall

and the winter sky was always sleepy and dark,

like a romantic painting

framed by French doors in the back.

With the other little girls

wrapped in pink tights and leg warmers and leotards,

I tumbled and turned,

distracted by people

shuffling by the back doors.

I began therapy sessions when I was sixteen.

Monday nights, on the second floor of some stuffy strip mall office.

Entering a coffee shop below

through its back doors made of glass,

I stepped backward into time.

And I recognized it all:

the doorframe,

the view outside the windows;

they were something from a past life,

except perhaps with lower ceilings.

So once a week, I schedule a coffee date with my three-year-old self.

Marked on my calendar, right below therapy, I have a meeting with a memory.

And she twirls in her Target tutu

and she leaps over the floorboards,

which have since been covered by plastic wood panels,

and her classical music plays somewhere

underneath the pop rhythms of the coffee shop.

I try to hum along,

try to feel her beneath my skin.

As I sip on my coffee we both daydream, distracted,

as we stare out the French doors in the back.

My sky melts into hers.

I wonder if three-year-old me can smell the coffee beans,

if she can feel my eyes tracing her movement

in the floor to ceiling mirror that no longer stands,

if she is performing for me.

She only ever saw me in her dreams,

now I only see her in mine.

Except on Monday afternoons,

when her ghost dances through me,

I silently sip my shaken espresso,

and we go home to different houses.

Home Grown

Coffee Date