Elegy for My Childhood

Yeah, I know. I haven't posted in a REALLLLY long time. One of my high school friends teased me on Facebook about how my blog lasted a whole two days. "I've been busy" is an understatement and I definitely have many thoughts I'd like to write about, but that would require thinking that I can't manage to do lately because I'm being pulled in about a thousand directions at my job.

One of my Christmas Break resolutions was to get more organized and to clean out drawers, my closet, etc. (I cleaned the closet. No easy task). In my entertainment center I found a notebook full of papers and random assignments from college. Most of them, especially my English papers, were a blur and I honestly don't remember writing 97% of them because they were usually produced in the early morning of the day that they were due. I did run onto a poem that I obsessed over when I was originally writing it for my Poetry Writing Workshop during Fall semester of 2007 and when I found it and read it in the middle of this night, I got teary-eyed. Here it is:

Elegy for My Childhood

Twenty years ago, I was almost three.

I wore my hair long, just past my tiny shoulder blades.

Usually there was sand in it, and if it was summer,

a green tint resonated.

I rarely moved from the sandbox and I loved to swim.

By all accounts, I had big, blue, curious eyes

And I asked a question with every breath.

I breast fed my dolls.

I spent my days with Grandpa.

I received great pleasure from snapping his suspenders when he least expected it.

I lived on hot dogs and ice cream,

and he'd watch cartoons with me all morning.

I used to lay on my tummy on the blue carpet,

arms outstretched, pretending I was floating in the ocean.

My grandpa would walk around me on the water.

I grew. I went to school but I didn't eat glue.

I was described as "precocious."

I remember the rich crayon smell of my elementary school

and how a new box of colors was all it took to feel complete.

School-age afternoons were spent with my brother, catching grasshoppers

and showing Grandpa what happened when we pulled their legs off.

I adored my mother.

Her mother died when I was 10

And on the day of the funeral, I perched myself

on the back of the 70 year old toilet, my chubby legs dangled down

to the carpet covered seat.

I tried to catch the threads between my toes as

I watched her

wipe the tears from her mascara stained cheeks

with a warm cloth.

Her long, brown hair was held back from her forehead.

That was the day I realized that I had her widow's peak,

and that I would inherit her laugh lines.

Five years ago I was almost eighteen

and I saw these years coming to an end.

My grandpa evolved into just a sweet old man

from the fearless, suspender- clad messiah 

of my childhood.

I noticed my mother's beauty less and disregarded her more.

I preferred not to ask questions, but to answer them

And I had long ago become disgusted with the idea of sand in my hair.

I didn't know it yet, but I was saying goodbye 

to the precocious little girl.

I'll soon be twenty-three.

I pay bills now and

I sit at a desk at least half the day,

most days.

Often my head aches with tension.

I have demands,

a responsibility as a scholar and an employee.

As the days pass, my recollection fades

from the memories of a previous life without adult burden.

Over the summer I lay awake in my bed in my parents' house

and remembered this little one.

I think I had always been waiting for her to come back,

and suddenly I realized that she was gone,

her dolls packed away in the attic.

I elegized and began looking forward to a reincarnation:

a little girl, born from my body,

with the same tiny shoulder blades

and sand in her hair.