By: Hannah Ahn

   When asked to describe childhood, I’ve often heard people default to familiar metaphors. One friend said it felt like a happy place. Another person said it felt like a bouncy castle. For me, childhood mostly felt like a waiting room.

   I don’t really remember much of being a kid. I can’t tell you when I stopped being a kid. Some poets and artists say that childhood is more like a feeling, or a habitual illness: it waxes and wanes. It comes back to you, resisting any kind of strict deadline or definition. Childhood, to me, then, was a constant state of mind, of thinking to myself: I’m not a child.

   I’m still waiting for the nostalgia to hit. For the sucker punch to land. Sometimes, I wonder when it will be. Maybe it will be after I receive all of my college decisions back in March. Maybe it will be when I begin packing up my things in anticipation of dorm life. Maybe it will be next winter, when I stand in line at the Trader Joe’s aisle and feel the sting on my bank account as I realize I am paying for my own carrots and laundry detergent.

   I have found out, in these last few months, just how much of a child I am. Last month, when I had a fever, I fell asleep to lullabies and somehow awoke in the dark to my Alexa playing five hours of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on a loop. I began to cry inexplicably, at first touched by the nature of the song, then later, out of frustration when my Alexa wouldn’t respond to my voice commands. I’ve been making deliberate efforts to make my life more childlike. I eat Pop-Tarts and crappy food made for sugar-addicted eight-year-old immune systems. I watch old TV shows I loved as a kid with my baby cousins: Bluey and Arthur, Peppa Pig. I speak more honestly. 

I’ve focused on spending more time with my parents. In one respect, however, I am glad I am not childlike: I possess the emotional maturity to deal with my parents as a budding adult. In conversations with my mother and my father, I glimpse sides of them I’ve never before witnessed: their hobbies, their interests, their habits. I discover what jokes make them laugh. Many people refer to one’s teenage and adult years as a period for “finding oneself.” My great joy these days is in discovering the people around me. 

   That’s where I find myself these days: in the dual act of looking forward and looking back. Of being excited for the future, but possessed by this great tenderness for the past. Memories, I know, along with a suitcase crammed full of my life’s possessions, are all I will take with me when I depart this year in the fall. I catch a glimpse of the plain white walls adorned with my childhood paintings and awards, the dust-lined books that I adored in childhood, and the rooms of my house where some of my happiest childhood memories were made. In Mrs. Crawford’s psychology class last year, I learned about something called “the primacy effect”– how we tend to remember our firsts. I am trying to remember them. I write them down in my journals and in my personal essays. When I take walks with my mother, I try to remember my first time learning how to walk. I ask her to tell me about stories of when I was younger, as if somehow, by hearing someone else, these memories will become more real to me. Childhood can become a place inside of me, something I can carry around. 

   I am waiting for that revelation of wonder in my own life.  I have been trying to live every day like it is my first. I am looking at the sights my eyes have passed through, unseeing. I count them daily now. The posters my teachers hang up in their rooms: the ones that say Anything is Possible and Work Hard, slogans I have become recalcitrant and dismissive towards over these past four years. Now I nod to myself, and I think, That is entirely correct. Happiness, by its nature, is a deeply uncomplicated emotion, maybe the most uncomplicated one the human canon possesses. It requires no justification but its own existence. 

   What I know about storytelling is that we are always supposed to come away with a lesson. At the end of each episode of Bluey or Arthur, we come away changed, a little bit, for the better. The things we go through in this life are supposed to change us. The question I have been posing to myself, as I exit the back road of childhood and start peeling onto adulthood’s highway, is: What have I brought with me? My answer, just like existence itself, is multi-variable and changing, but most days, it’s this: some stages of life end, but all the pieces you possess remain the same. And each day, you start again.