“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”–Abraham Lincoln

Yesterday is gone and I know there’s nothing I can do about it now but some days I find myself reaching backwards, towards those sweet memories gone by. On bad days I just want to be 13-years-old again dancing around my room singing Backstreet Boys at the top of my lungs with my best friend, Katie. I want to laugh uncontrollably at absolutely nothing and sit on the river dock like me & my family use to do. Now it’s all like a dream that’s slowly fading and now I’m just trying to figure out what’s in store. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we always had that false belief that we’ll never grow old and everyone we love will always be around? We’re told to cherish the present because the future isn’t promised but who says some days we can’t just wish for the past? On days it’d be so much better than the here and now. Face it, we all have bad days and we can’t always have these walls built up so high that we never let the pain in. Pain is the strongest, hardest, and most beautiful emotion we can feel…you learn everything you need to know about yourself. I’m not scared to admit I break down and cry in my room sometimes when no one knows because it’s like a rain that washes away all the pain I’ve been holding onto. I cry a lot be it sad or happy. When we “grow up” we start to find ourselves and I’ve found that I hold onto pain a lot longer than I should so I’ve learned to release it through my writing or be it crying. I slowly see things changing now that I would have never noticed before. My little “brother” Chihuahua, as my momma called him, Dodi died this past week and he was 12-years-old and more than anything it made me realize how quickly time is passing me by…where does it go? I cried that night not only because we had lost a family member but because I know time is flying by and all I want to do is reach out grab the clock and stop it just for a little while; just long enough for me to take a good look around and soak in everything surrounding me. I want my memories to be so vivid that I never forget a moment be it good or bad. So, wouldn’t it be awesome if just for an hour we could go back to whatever memory we wanted to just sit there and take it in all over again? Of course, we wouldn’t appreciate them as much then would we? They’d no longer be memories and we’d find ourselves constantly running to the past. Yes, some days I wish I could go back but at the same time I realize that there are reasons why things are the way they were then and the way they are now. We’ve just got to make new memories and truly cherish them in the here and now so they can last us a lifetime. I guess in the words of Journey, “I’m just a small town girl living in a lonely world.”

xoxo
- Kayla

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