Day Five

Do you ever look up and just for a second not recognize yourself? As though your eyes are slightly bigger or jaw more pronounced. You aren’t seeing a younger or older version of yourself but a version that never existed. A version that is so foreign yet so known, like a relative you haven’t seen in years but you’ve heard their lives unfold through a third party.

This happens to me at the end of each school year as I sort through my mess of old papers and used cough drop wrappers.

Eery year I save papers from years past and every year I sort through and throw some away while others withstand the cut and are provided the privilege of being tucked away on a top shelf for another year. Each year there’s a bit less than the year before and someday I imagine there will be nothing.

But for now there are all those glimpses of the person I once was as high school morphed me from a child to an adult. And every once and I while, as I stare down at all those versions of myself, I see the version that was never there.