Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

The side effects are insurmountable.

When I was a child with a sinus infection, the doctor gave me antibiotics in the form of a bubblegum flavored liquid in a syringe. Unlike my sister, I loved those meds. It tasted like candy. That’s why they do it, though — they make the medication palatable for a child. A sick child needs medication to get well again, but doctors know they can’t handle unpleasant things, like a horse sized pill that makes your stomach hurt.

When I was a junior in college with strep throat, the doctor gave me antibiotics in the form of little orange pills. I had to take them twice daily for a week. They left a bitter coating on my tongue. They made my stomach hurt. But I could handle unpleasant things.

What I can’t handle is coming home from college and living with my parents again. I exist in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by my childhood things, but the girl who lived there has been long gone. Under the light blue paint is the yellow paint that used to be the color of my nursery when I slept there as a baby. I repainted the room when I was fifteen. I rearranged the room several times in the eight months I’ve been home. And something feels not quite right.

Sometimes I look at my face and notice the faintness of a wrinkle next to the corner of my eye. My father has them. My face has lost it’s baby puffiness, and my cheekbones are apparent now. I look like a woman. I’ve outgrown the girl I used to be. I’m no longer growing up, I’m simply getting older. And what I didn’t realize, is that so are my parents. And they have been, this entire time. They stopped growing up before I was born, and this whole time, they’ve been adults growing older. The lines go deeper in their face and gray has begun to pepper their hair more and more. They’ve started talking about ‘after’ quite a lot. They’ve written a will. They aren’t old…just older.

I expected my cousins to grow up. There were four of us: me, my sister, my cousin born in ‘05, and my other cousin born in ‘08. I was the oldest, and between me and my youngest cousin, there’s a five year age gap. Because I was first, I was always the first to grow up. The first to graduate high school, go to college, then graduate college. It’s natural that they’d follow but some part of me didn’t believe that they would. All of the sudden, as if overnight, my youngest cousin turns eighteen this summer. The baby of us, heading to college. Maybe Miami, maybe California. My other cousin lives on the big island, surfing on the weekends, going to school, and life guarding in between. My sister is studying to be an actress. I’m still here. We all have lives now. And the little kids that used to chase fireflies in the summer with muddy feet are nowhere to be found.

Tough pills to swallow also look like pictures. Snapshots of moments in time all collected in a camera roll, a scrapbook, a photo album, a pile of print-outs on a desk. And in those pictures are the girls I’m not friends with anymore, and we’re sixteen. Or it’s a picture of my grandfather, who passed away two years ago this May. But he’s young in the photo, his hair still dark and less wispy. Some of the pictures are my friends from college, snapshots of the stupid moments, but we were laughing, and now we all live in different states. It’s proof those moments happened, but it’s also proof that it only exists in that frame.

And the side effect of all of this is nostalgia. That pretty little word with its terrible little meaning. It’s a heavy longing, nostalgia. And it only exists because of how it once made me feel. There was something about these moments that made me happy, and how wonderful it is that I have something to miss. But God, does it hurt.

I wish there was an easier way. An easier way to tell me that my childhood will forever be withheld now, at farther than an arm’s length. That I take pictures to remember moments that will only happen once, and that it’ll never last how I want it to. How my cousins and I will never be as close as we once were, no matter how much we try or how badly we want it. An easier way to show me that my parents weren’t the only ones adding numbers to their age on birthdays, and how they’re beginning to hint at the likeness of their parents.

I don’t want bitter orange-colored pill-shaped antibiotics anymore. I need the sugar coated version. I think I’m reacting badly.

I can’t stop the feeling that time is fleeting and it’s slipping out of my hands before I’ve gotten a grip on it.