I will just say this, I know looking into yourself, staring off into the sea of memories before you. I know seeing the good, my mother cradling me in her arms, and bad, screams and threats of divorce. The ruinous, black inky spots in your perfect space are hard to bear. You look out and feel the tears fall down your face. Seeing yourself grow and mature as a person is heart wrenching to most, feeling their childlike innocence slipping through their fingers like sand; But, for others it's the most beautiful thing to mankind. Remembering the days where your youth was the utmost important. I know that we are a mosaic, bits and pieces of our past puzzling in and making us who we are today. Our present thoughts of “What am I gonna do?” swirling around your mind like a funnel, and your future, a shimmering light in the darkest of nights.

I know that if you look past the ocean, there's emptiness, soon to be filled with the core things that come later in life. Your highschool graduation, your prom, your 21’st birthday, the age of “so called” independence. We're all so young, the life ahead of us unexpected; yet coming rapidly every second. Are you ready? For the love, the heartbreak, the misery, the rebirth? Even if you aren't, things like this are inevitable. The ocean will keep swaying, you will keep going, and time won't ever stop for anyone.

I know looking at the person you used to be, the memories you made breaking the floodgates and washing over you, relieving you of the burning hot sand under your feet, the scorching rocks making blisters on your heels. You stand alone with your balled up fists, your fingernails making crescents in your palm. What do you see? Your family smiling warmly, your friends helping you through stressful experiences, your first lover, your first argument, something you were sure wasn't your fault but they made you believe it was. The water is cooling, refreshing even. Reminding you that you are real, you are here. You are experiencing all the things that form a vessel, a soul, a consciousness.

I know the noise of seashells, the sand crunching underneath my sandals, the sound of the water doing its dance, swaying to the beat of its own tune; laughter, cries of joy, your mothers tune that's been sung for as long as you can remember.

I know the smell of saltwater, mother’s goulash and dad’s cigarettes on the ashtray, put out a long time ago. I know the smell of my lover's cologne, the scent dizzying as it mixes with my perfume. I know the smell of my room, fresh rain seeping through the fan in my window.

I know something of longing. Wishing to be that little girl I was before. I miss the times when things were easy, Nickelodeon on the CRT, a movie I know all too well but can't recall.

I miss the times before the pain and suffering of life and its occurrences, before the changes. All things that I've experienced make me one with myself, make me who I am today. 

The growing process is surely long and grueling, if someone said things would be this way I would've braced for impact, but no one ever did. There were times at night where I held myself in an embrace, my face warm and wet from the seemingly endless streams of sorrow. There were times when I looked out to sea and saw a hurricane, my head was loud and pounding, the usually dormant sand and rocks beneath my feet now angry, flying and hitting me in the face as I walked alone down the endless beach of my mind, desperate for my childhood and dreading my adolescence.