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no one talks about the unannounced death of a version of you when you move countries. sometimes i can’t control the grief i have for the 8 year old me and the wish to have stayed with her a little longer. having to move is surely a blessing as it opens space for new experiences and people to enter your life. however, when you're a child, everything moves fast and there's little time to reflect because of all the naivety and constant learning. you don't understand the consequences of not spending enough time with your grandmother or how convenient it was to make or even keep friends.
it's one thing to move before you gain consciousness. it's another thing to move when you do gain consciousness, but don't exactly know what's going on.
maybe this isn't about moving. maybe this is about growing up or maybe it's about both.
Jan 16, 2025
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This hit so close to my heart because I also moved at 8 years old and there is not a single day I don’t think about the little girl I left behind and how different my life would‘ve been if my family and I never left.
jjovvz its surely bittersweet but im so glad you were able to relate...ive always pondered but recently I've just been really missing my childhood and the birthplace I call home a lot and like you said, I wonder how different everything must be if i never moved ...
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the concept of time can be comforting, but also scary at the same time. it’s a comfort, knowing that your wounds would slowly close itself up as time passes by. but it’s also scary, that when you think about it, we really are only insignificant beings, in the face of time.
it is both scary and comforting, when i realized how easy it is to move on from the past. people that you once thought couldn’t live without, suddenly become a supporting character in one of your chapters of life. the name that you swore would never forget, suddenly becomes “that one friend that i had back in high school.”
and what’s even scarier, is that, sometimes it is beyond our control. time just… took them away from us without our consent. names, places, memories. and most of the time, we wouldn’t even feel the loss and grief that should’ve come with losing them.
Jan 11, 2025
An old man comes into my line , hunched over and dragging his feet,
As he puts items on the conveyor belt i see his knuckles white, and taunt with letters spelling “R-I-T-A”
RITA reveals his youth to me, she paints à vision of the couple behind him
I can see him standing with à woman, who’s young with à soft voice that creeps under the music my job is playing.
She buys à single bag of candy smiling as her child pulls on her arm.
Her partner, doesn’t seem to match the town we’re in and when he puts cash on the counter his knuckles read “R-I-C-O” instead,
RICO’s face mixes into someone from home and I wonder if he’ll live the same life as the man in front of him or meet the same fate as the latter.
Will he be able to retire in à sleepy town like Rita’s lover?
Or will he die young, far away from the smiling girl trying to prove himself?
His mother would wake up in à cold sweat to 30 missed calls. She’ll think of him at 6, nervous for his first day of school and collapse on the floor at his funeral. His childhood friends would rush over even though they haven’t seen him outside of Facebook in 16 years
But they’ll remember the important things, like him learning to ride his bike and getting à tattoo to match his dad for his approval even though it didn’t work. His dad would look at the casket and shed his first tears in à decade realizing that perhaps he was too hard like his father before him
After the quiet of the funeral, his friend would go back home to his empty apartment and have à longing for home and feel the need to visit home to see his mother to reminisce.
She would be the woman coming into my line now. Smile lines reveal to me the years of joy he’s brought her and in her bag, 6 oranges symbolizing good luck. She tells me the good news of her son visiting and tells me while talking that hes far older than me
I smile and ask her to guess my age “17” she says proudly. I feel disappointed that she didnt guess correctly. Everyone says that I’ll miss these years of mistaken Identity. But in my youth I wish to skip it. At age 20 , I wish I had à life of tattoos and lines that express à life full of laughs
I’m aware that with this change that no one will see me as the girl that I am anymore but this refined thing. No one would see me as carefree and fun loving as à mother but irresponsible and immature. At the young age of 40 no one will see me as curious but nosy and stupid
By then I won't be insecure but desperate, by then I should be wise.
I wonder if the woman in front of me remembers her first boyfriend vividly or her mother cutting her deeply for the first time or does she just feel the grooves that have been carried in her
At 60 will she remember being at the edge of the windowsill at 14 and view it as an error of her youth? And when she saw the same signs of decline in her own daughter will she ignore it like her mother had done her and instead clasp her daughters hands in prayer and force her to her knees. Or would she view her daughter pulling away as necessary instead of à sign of abandonment and remember that in her youth she was her daughter and vice versa
Feb 13, 2025
Sometimes it just pops out of nowhere, sometimes it’s just a passing memory and sometimes out of the blue I feel the weight of what happened. I had a best friend, a person with which I connected in a way I never did with anyone. She moved out of the city and with that she stopped any communication with me. I miss her. I miss her so much. I feel like I must have fucked up big time for this to be happening. In our last call I told her I was worried we would lose contact with the distance and she told me it would never happen. I believed her. It’s a weird sadness; most of the time I can see clearly that more than try to text her I cannot do much and I’m angry or confused about the situation but it passes, I go by my day. But sometimes this wave of sadness arrives and I remember how she made me laugh, how she looked at me, the day we actually talked like friends for the first time and then it hits me that we might have spoken for the last time. how could that be? I still believe her. One day she’ll call me and my memories of today will fade and get replaced by others of us together.
I should have called her more, told her more times how I loved her, how she was beautiful, we should have gone to more concerts together, we should have said yes to that dude who wanted to interview us for a tiktok. We should have when there still was a we.
One day talking about relationships, I mentioned how incapable I am at letting go and how sometimes I start to resent the person I can’t let go for the things we do to each other. So maybe it’s all for the best, maybe I’m being spared, maybe it will save our memories from being tainted, maybe that‘s all the time meant for us. I don’t know but I wish I did.
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