The act of breathing in memories

What did your childhood smell and sound like?

For me, memories of childhood are of blue skies peeking out from between towering pine trees.

Childhood is the sound of girl’s voices echoing and bouncing around me like a tornado of sound.

The sound makes its way to my ears reminding me that I am in a world that we have created

It is a world where we are free to be girls

Free to be weird and loud, to walk with our arms around each other and whisper secrets and share stories about the women that we want to become

Memories of those days flow together in an endless stream of images of inside jokes and insane laughter

 In my memory, I run around in the warm summer air, leaping from rock to root not caring about properly placing my feet or worrying about being thrown off balance and crashing down to the ground

In my memory; I am simply me

I am not too fat or too loud.

I am the size and volume that I am supposes to be

There is no worry of my placement in the world

There is only the joy of playing in the sun and being surrounded by the love of a community of women and girls

And girls becoming women

My childhood was emulating girls who were older than me

It was a female thing

It was about comparing them to the woman that I wanted to be

I was a girl who clung to my childhood while being intensely aware if the fact that it would end one day

That I would be catapulted into adulthood

And I knew exactly what I wanted that to look like

But I have never been able to fully let go of the world that I created and reveled in as a young girl

So every summer, I return and return to hide myself in the shade of those same trees that sheltered me as a little girl

I crave that fresh air of Pine needles and wood

I Claw and Scrape at my memories and ignore the sweat and tears of exertion as I try desperately to keep this world intact

Because I want to share it so that I never have to leave it

 I listen to the breeze in the trees and the voices of girls calling to each other

I pretend that I am still that girl

But I have grown

And being here is no longer the same because my world is not here for me anymore

It is a new world for a new community of women

I have to find a new world to create and to shape

This world is my childhood

I found it and made it my own and

Now I treasure it and how it shaped me

We created each other

And to leave it is to leave behind a part of myself

And make room something new