New and Old and Everything in Between

I wish I could show how my thoughts make pictures. How I so clearly see the past, present, and future all interconnected with each other. How the days of bonding over the amount of Shopkins or the color slime we made that day faded into putting on makeup together before a school dance, music playing dully in the background. How listening to the new songs on the radio turned into screaming them nostalgically during the timeouts in football games. How I still draw on my hands in class, and how my mom still scolds me for it. The feeling of diving under waves in the ocean in the midst of summer, type of feeling. Tearing up trying to hold in a laugh in a silent classroom, feeling. Continuously playing rock-paper-scissors, eenie-meenie-minie-moe, flipping a coin, or thumb wars to make life-altering decisions. Never turning down the possibility of playing Uno. How ice-cream is still the sweetest treat of all. 

All these flashes of life in my head can only be shown through already-created memories. I see it in the parade scene of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and in the dancing scene of The Breakfast Club. It’s vibrant in the tunnel scene of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It’s alive in the photos in my phone. The Christmas tree across the room with ornaments my brothers and I made years ago are proof of it. My cat sitting on the table with the photo of my dead cat represents it. 

I hate the phrase “recreate yourself.” I get the sentiment; turning the bad habits into the good ones and getting a healthy perspective. But nothing can be new without the old. How would I know how much I hate dried mangoes without first loving them? Or realizing that I like cats more than dogs after my dog almost took my eye out as a toddler? You are yourself because of your life. Nobody can take that away from you, not even yourself. You either erase your past and forget who you are or evolve into someone who can now withstand anything. That’s all there is to it. 

Career Day

Elementary school always had those “career days,” where the students dressed up as what they wanted to be when they grew up. In seventh grade we took career possibility tests. Last year my geometry teacher made us take the MBTI personality test to see what kind of career would fit our personality. Just a few weeks ago, our history classes met with our counselors in the library to talk about the planning for the future; things like careers. 

One of the main things that everyone asks when talking about future jobs is “Well, what can you do every day? What would you enjoy doing every day? What could you never get sick of?” I think my issue is that I can see too many waves of possibility. I’ve had phases of what I’ve been wanting to do ever since that first career day in elementary school. One week it was a vet. Another an architect. Then a teacher. Then a lawyer. Then a psychologist. Then an environmental scientist. And again, again, and again. 

I know I can’t be everything at once, but it’s so hard for me to decide on one simple thing to focus on for the rest of my life. I want to be everything, partly because I enjoy all of those things, but also because I just want to experience it. I want to know the every-day life of designing buildings or getting to help sick animals. I want to work with kids and feel accomplished when I get them to understand a concept. I want to help the earth.

Needless to say I was never the same “career” each year of elementary school. I dressed up as different versions of myself every grade and saw which one felt the best and the most “me.” The problem with that was that nothing was accomplished; I felt great every time. There were always some kids who were the same every year. There were the firemen, policemen, the occasional president, scientists, doctors, etc. I didn’t know how they were so certain. How every year they woke up on career day and put on the same outfit, ready to go on with their day, not having a second thought about it. I wished I could be them. 

Then middle school came and there were no more career days. No one talked about it anymore. It wasn’t mentioned every year (except for that one day in seventh grade) and I barely thought about it. 

High school was a different story. Now, the classes you took mattered on what you wanted to do. The stress of many people knowing what they wanted to do while I was still shuffling a deck of cards and pulling one out whenever someone asked me about my future. Now, at every holiday my grandparents ask what I want to do or what college I want to go to. 

The only answer I have now is “I don’t know,” and they nod, and it’s left at that. 

Over the Mountain, Through the Woods

• Learning how to play so many games
• Uno, Chicken Foot, Skip-Bo as a kid
• Cards Against Humanity when everyone got a little older
• Opening presents on my grandpa’s lap 
• Helping my grandma, mom, and aunt chop vegetables or make frosting while my grandpa talked to my brothers about stocks
• Bringing our dog over, watching him play with the two other dogs
• Experiencing every single holiday, year after year
• Without fail, talking about my dad each time
• Loads and loads of advice about things from here to the moon
• Reviewing recent movies and TV shows, whether or not they deserve a sequel or a second season
• Inhaling homemade pies or cake, regretting it ten minutes later
• Asking both my grandparents about how their businesses are doing and whether or not they’re planning on retiring
• Asking for years and years and each time they say “Good, and no.”
• Staying the night one Thanksgiving, in my aunt’s old room, trying out all of her leftover makeup 
• A five hour night feeling like just half an hour
• After eating, sitting in the family room in a major food coma
• Bursting out laughing in serious conversations
• Hugging and kiss-on-cheek goodbyes, saying “See you soon,” knowing that promise will be kept

Ghosts Who Had Skin

The neighborhood at my dad’s house was packed with kids. I was the second youngest out of the whole cul de sac, not counting toddlers or babies. Most of them were fifth graders up until eighth graders. The majority of afternoons we would be playing a huge game of hide and seek at the small sports and dog park a few blocks down the road or Infection along the backways of the neighborhoods. We’d all come home sweating, completely out of breath, knees and arms slightly bloody, and grinning wide. 

Some nights though, mostly the weeks leading up to Halloween, we would get together at the prime of twilight and take on a game of Ghost in the Graveyard. The nit-picky rules haven’t stuck in my mind after all these years, but it was another take on Sardines, where one person—the ghost—hid and once they were found, it turned into tag. The ghost had to chase down everyone until the person caught was the new ghost, and it repeated and repeated until our parents yelled to get back home, it was late. 

The first ghost was always the last shoe left in Blue-Shoe. When the counter’s finger landed someone’s grimy Converse, they would whoop and yell in glee and skip to the circle of other “alive” people. In the times where my shoe was alone, Naomi, who was like an older sister to me, always volunteered to take my place; she felt bad that I, one of the youngest, had to go first. Even though I loved Naomi, I always yelled at her that I could do it and that I didn’t need help. 

And every time I scolded her, she ended up having to be the second ghost with me after ten rounds of me catching nobody. 

We were ghosts together, yet when we sprinted past each other, both reaching out in hopes of grabbing someone’s hood, we were beaming. We were ghosts, but we were alive. 

When we—Naomi—caught somebody, sometimes it was already late enough for everyone to go home. But when it wasn’t, when it was the rare nights when somehow every single one of our parents got stuck watching a movie or the news, we got another hour or so to jump behind bushes, scale up trees, scramble into the bed of a truck, or to just keep running and hope the ghost just slips right past you. 

When we decided we were done, we’d all sit in a circle in the little grass area and just breathe. I would sit next to Naomi while she braided my hair or I braided her’s. We were the ghosts who turned out to be alive. We could run and breathe and braid. We could always smile while we did so. 

Toilet Paper, Roofs, and Chocolate Milk

The last few months of eighth grade was the best time of my life. I constantly was living just to have fun. The largest extent of my and all of my friends’ homework and responsibilities each night was finishing a few math problems, copying down half a page of history notes, doing some dishes, and other things that took no more than maybe 45 minutes each night. 

Most of my friends at the time lived relatively close, and we all had bikes, so that’s how we spent most of our nights and weekends. The warm musk of summer slipped into the briskness of leftover spring as we biked along the streets of neighborhoods or next to the playgrounds of parks. We biked with music playing from a speaker, singing along to the lyrics, and nothing felt real. We would go to Savers early Saturday mornings to get the best thrifts and eat at Taco Bell for lunch, stopping at a few garage sales on the way home, before we would quickly go back home to grab a bathing suit and meet at the community pool. 

We meticulously planned out TPing our other friends’ houses and climbing the roofs of our previously-attended schools, discussing what we’d do in case we were caught, but that wasn’t even a fraction of what we thought of while doing it. I still have photos of us decked in all-black in the security camera footage of our friend’s house, launching the rolls of toilet paper into his tree. I have scars on my knees from scrambling on the shingles of the elementary school roof, clutching onto my friend’s wrists for dear life. But I don’t remember the trickling anxiety of getting caught. I remember the adrenaline and excitement of doing something just because we wanted to. 

Eighth grade was the last year an entire grade ate in one spot. As we all ate the day-specials (Fridays were Pick Up Stix, Wednesdays were pizza, etc.), I noticed a pattern with one particular item being tossed into the trash each day: chocolate milk. It was even more unwanted than the apples or oranges provided, which was definitely something. Naturally, my friends and I decided to gather the chocolate milks from people who were going to throw them away anyway and put them to good use. We all didn’t like the lunch supervisors or the vice principal who was constantly walking around for prey. So some good payback (we thought) was to hide the chocolate milks in places that were either very high up or hard to see. Since there was only a few supervisors walking around at lunch, we had plenty time to throw them up in the crevices next to the roof, jump up to put them on the speakers of the walls, balance them on the stalls of the bathrooms (we got both grounds covered; we were thorough), and even put them in perpendicular poles of the lunch tables, right in front of the supervisors. It wasn’t the craziest form of rebellion, but to us it was.

We didn’t have to hide the chocolate milks. We didn’t have to climb the roofs of schools. We didn’t have to travel with some shopping carts we found on the curbs of our neighborhoods. Nothing we did was too diabolical, but it didn’t have to be. We thought we were being risky, and that’s all that mattered to us. Going on early morning bike rides or sunset beach swims was everything we always needed at those moments because we wanted them. It was so easy to make the things we yearned for happen. It led to happiness. It led to perfection.