4

Today, by my own admission, I am old.

I am old because I know that the plural of passerby is passersby and I remember the original GameBoy when the present young generation is lost in a haze of Nintendo DS. My childhood is no longer a present—it’s just a past, because there isn’t any child living it now. Things are different, times they are a-changing, as the song goes and all that jazz.

Think about when we were young. I had this pair of shoes that was made entirely out of this malleable plastic—we called them jelly shoes. They had stripes in them, like the too-popular gladiators of today. We would play in the dirt and not care and Dad would carry us upstairs to the bath so we could wash our feet. When we took off our shoes, we could see the stripes of dirt. We don’t use that bathtub anymore, because we don’t live in that house, because there weren’t enough rooms after Kelsey was born.



That was the same bathtub where I remember getting my hair washed with harsh chemical soap after one of YOUR friends came to YOUR sleepover party with lice in her hair. I had thick hair, even back then. You can’t tell anyone who never had lice that you once had lice because they’re horrified. They assume you’re dirty and disgusting. I fought those damn little buggers for a few weeks (felt like a few months, to my third-grade mind) because my mother and I never could find a soap string enough to kill them in may whole head. Nowadays, you can hire a place to do it for you, one time guarantee. You never need have lice for more than one day.

In third grade, I met one of my oldest friends. Now, she and I together are the leaders of a group of twenty-five odd girls. We make sure that they’re always doing what they should be doing, learning what they should be learning, and all in perfect unison. She called me this morning when I was still in bed at quarter to twelve because I stayed up until three in the morning because I’m having a useless summer.

I’m having a useless summer because I’m old enough that not only have I had a job, but it kills me to not have a job now. I don’t feel busy enough. I have things pressing down on me with the sight of the future little children can’t grasp. What did I care about college or the next year at school when we met?

When we met, I thought you were Christine, can you believe that? Or rather, I thought Christine was you. I can distinctly remember meeting her first at that Christmas party, so many years ago. Now we play tricks on each other for Christmas and birthdays, and let me tell you, mine is going to be EPIC this year.

This year, you’ll be coming home from college. You’ll make a ten-hour commute to Christmas dinner. I’ll be making my usual hour, but that hardly counts for anything. I was just in Paris. I flew over an entire ocean all by myself. We’re too old, don’t you see that? We can make these trips without any aid. We’re getting old.

And next year I’ll be living alone, just like you. And it won’t ever be like the times where we shared a room and stayed up late in the night whispering in the night because we weren’t allowed to talk that late. We don’t ask permission anymore.

We’re too damn old.