I Mourned Her

She was gone and yet I yearned for her to come back to me. Nothing that I could do or say could ever bring her back, life doesn’t work that way, it never has and never will.

She was by my side until the very end, now I mourn her loss. I cannot imagine a world without her and yet I must keep on going.

It amazes me how quickly life can change in the blink of an eye. One day you believe nothing will ever change, the next things blow up around you. Everything you ever knew, in pieces, just like that.

I was always a creative type of person. The teachers in school would blather on about my talents, how clever I really was. When I was painting or drawing or playing in the mud, she was always there with me to laugh at my madness, the chaos I caused.

“She’s a modern-day Picasso!” They would say as they pinned my work to the classroom notice board.

“She’s a genius with words! Remember who I am when you’re famous!”

I was conflicted. At home and when I was at school, I would behave differently. At home I was more expressive, I could shine when an idea came to mind, I would execute it immediately. My mind would burst with ideas. At home, the pens we would both draw with, would fly off the pages, our thoughts would jump around on trampolines. We were both free.

At school however, although I started with a creative mind, full of buzzing ideas to spill out across the table, I was constrained. The older I got, the more she was left behind, she couldn’t catch up with her tiny legs and no matter how long I waited for her, the school made sure I was that little step ahead of her. She was getting lost and there was nothing I could do about it.

I had a small group of friends growing up, similar interests, at first. Games played in the playground, water fights outside in the garden, rooting through dressing up boxes and raiding our parent’s makeup. We were nightmares but we enjoyed every moment we spent with each other, in our land of make believe.

She and I revelled in the joy we could all bring. The laughter, the colourings in, where we would scribble outside the lines. How we made our Barbies fly around space. At that moment in time, our imaginations were out of control.

When I left school at eleven and started High School, life became scarier. Out in the big wide world, parents weren’t there to solve our problems. In our first few days, we were told that school life was going to be different now. We were independent. She struggled to hold on. Each day I returned to school a part of her broke off.

Assignment after assignment, the class was told how to write essays, how to manage money and look after your own equipment. I could feel myself changing, parts of my body growing and I couldn’t stop the process. It was no longer acceptable to play make believe on the playground. Now, the girls all gathered in their groups, chuckling about the latest episodes they had watched on television. They exchanged phone numbers, laughed at boys making jokes. She had no idea what to do with this information, and I knew I was on my own.

Peers would make snide comments behind my back, how I was too old to be playing with dolls, the ones I hid in my backpack covered in stickers. Even my parents started to voice their opinions. I was nearly a teenager, too old to be playing around. It was time to wise up. I didn’t want to leave her alone to crumble away, but deep down I knew I had no other choice.

As the years rolled on by, I felt myself agreeing more with everyone around me. I was different inside and out. She didn’t recognise me anymore, after all puberty does wonders to a girl.

As I sit back, sitting behind my desk, awaiting the end of my school year, the final time I will walk through these doors as a sixteen-year-old, I begin to mourn her. I mourn who she was, how much freedom she really had. Perhaps when I am fully grown, I can visit her again, but it won’t be the same, not like it was back when she was the same age.

For now, I am a teenager, too afraid to stand out from the crowd. I must let her die in the ground, because if not I will not survive either. I mourn the child I was. I relish in the memories of childhood but that is in the past. The me I was, the playful version of me, is gone and buried six feet underground. I miss the child I once was.