When We Were Small

When we were small, the world felt enormous—not because it truly was, but because we had not yet learned to measure it with fear. Back then, distances were crossed with bare feet, not hesitation. Walls were climbed, not avoided. People were trusted before we learned the price of doing so.

Childhood was a place, not a time.
And somewhere along the way, we left it without noticing the door closing behind us.

There are days I still remember the language we once spoke—a language made of laughter too loud for rooms, stories whispered in the dark, and promises we believed in simply because we didn’t know how not to. Back then, the world taught gently. Pain came in small lessons: a scraped knee, a broken toy, a friend who moved away.

We cried, yes. But we always believed tomorrow would fix what hurt.

We didn’t yet know that some tomorrows never arrive.

But that was the beauty of being small—we lived as if they always would.

Sometimes I try to picture us then: two small silhouettes running ahead of our shadows, chasing a sun that never seemed to set. You carried your hope like a slingshot in your pocket, always ready to aim it at the next dream. I carried mine like a folded note in my palm, afraid the wind might steal it if I let go.

Yet somehow, we understood each other.

You pulled me forward.
I steadied you.
We learned the world together, step by trembling step.

And long before life taught us how to harden, we taught each other how to soften.

Growing up didn’t happen in one day.
It happened in tiny fractures—moments when the world asked us to be older than we felt.

The first time someone spoke to you with cruelty.
The first time I realized not every promise can be kept.
The first time we saw love fail in the adults we trusted.

Each moment chipped away at our smallness, carving us into something new—something more careful, more aware, more afraid.

But even as the world demanded pieces of us, we tried to keep the best parts from slipping away.

There is a kind of courage in remembering who you used to be.

We didn’t know then that joy had an expiration date. We didn’t know how quickly innocence erodes, how quietly childhood packs its bags. We only knew the smallness that felt like safety—where minutes stretched wide, where mornings tasted like possibility, where the future felt too distant to fear.

I think about those versions of us sometimes—the ones who believed the world would meet us with open hands. And I wonder: did we disappoint them? Did we become too cautious, too guarded, too grown?

Or did we become exactly what they hoped—older, yes, but still carrying flashes of light from when life was simpler?

Maybe growing up wasn’t about losing the smallness, but about learning how to protect the parts worth keeping.

Whenever life feels heavy now, I return to us—
to the dirt under our nails,
to the sun-warm earth,
to the way we thought everything broken could be mended with a little glue and a lot of belief.

I close my eyes and find myself in the old backyard, where the sky stretched wide and forgiving. I can still hear our voices—unpredictable, messy, full of dreams that didn’t yet have names.

And I realize something I never understood then:

We weren’t small.
We were vast.
Because everything we felt, we felt completely.

We felt joy with our whole bodies.
We felt wonder without apology.
We felt love without fear.

Maybe that’s why those days still echo, even now.

What I know now, after all these years, is this:

We grow older, yes.
But we never stop being the children we once were.

The smallness remains—quiet but alive—waiting for the moments when we slow down enough to hear it. Waiting for the days when our hearts remember how to open without being asked. Waiting for us to choose softness again.

And when life feels too loud, too sharp, too heavy, I return to that little version of myself—and to you—and I listen.

Because somewhere in those early echoes lies the truest version of who we were.
And maybe, if we’re brave enough, the truest version of who we still are.