Growing Pains

I hold old photos like apologies I forgot to send,

 like postcards from a timeline I accidentally left behind in the dryer,

 faded, 

creased,

 smelling faintly of lavender and the lie of a future I once believed in.

That girl in the frame? 

She’s wearing my name like a thrift store sweater,

 still warm from someone else's dreams. 

She’s smiling with teeth I no longer claim, 

a mouth that hadn’t yet learned what it meant to bite back tears instead of birthday cake.

She walked like gravity hadn’t found her yet,

 like hope jingled in her pockets, 

nickels of belief, a currency I’ve since run out of. 

She wore the world like a backpack filled with feathers. 

I wear it now like a wet coat, 

stitched with goodbyes.

Sometimes I watch her the way you watch the sky before a storm, 

knowing something beautiful is about to break. 

She laughed like the wind had a secret,

 like her ribs were a cathedral and joy lived in the pews.

But here’s what the photo doesn’t show: that girl already knew grief. 

A different kind. 

The kind that built nests in her chest and called itself “normal.”

 She didn’t cry because no one told her she could. 

She just carried her sorrow in silence, 

folded it into paper cranes and called it childhood. 

She kept dreaming because it was the only way to stay warm. 

She kept smiling because she didn’t know she was allowed to stop.

And now I stand in mirrors like they owe me answers. 

I wear this skin like a coat two sizes too small. 

It pinches in places light used to live. 

My smile’s grown calluses. 

There’s a stiffness in my joy, like it’s trying to remember how to stretch.

And I miss her. 

God, I miss her.

But not out of pity.

 Out of reverence.

 I miss her the way trees miss their saplings,

 not because they were smaller,

 but because they were sacred. 

She survived in silence.

 And now I speak for her.

I don’t know if she was ever really me, 

or just someone I dressed up as on the days I thought I was worth loving. 

But I love her now, the way armor loves what it guards.

 I’d build a thousand walls around her smile, if I thought it would keep the darkness out.

I feel like a ghost, 

haunting her memories, 

scratching at the windows of the past, 

watching her dance in the kitchen in socks that never slid on grief.

I wish I could time-travel with my fingertips, 

touch the part of the timeline before the world sharpened,

 before I became a rough draft in permanent ink.

But I keep going. 

I keep walking forward, 

like maybe the stranger I’m becoming isn’t a disappearance,

 but a metamorphosis.

Like maybe I’m not lost, just mid-alchemy. 

And maybe, just maybe, she’s still somewhere in here, 

waiting for me beneath all this dust.

And this time, I won’t just remember her. 

I won’t just mourn her.

 I’ll guard her like a lighthouse guards the sea, 

and I won’t let the world steal her light.