It was in my first month of being twenty years old that I watched The Little Prince for the first time

I never knew what it meant to worry for my heart until I finished the movie

I sat in the corner of my bed with tears in my eyes as my brain became a foggy machine chanting the same sentence over and over again

 

I have forgotten.

 

I became the grey image of a sullen adult with blank eyes and bleak clothes

My hippocampus struggled to recognize a tinier version of me, a happier version, a version with a rose

All that my brain gears could muster up with were sparked by my amygdala

A senseless fear exploded in me as I recalled moments where my childhood was slipping away

 

The day it grew difficult to get out of bed in the morning was the day I finally understood what it meant to lose myself

It was a gradual loss of myself, an emptiness crawling up my spine and invading my brain

It wasn’t a switch that caused me to forget what being a child was

It was a slow burning process,

where I lost what it meant to laugh uncaring of others, to smile unafraid of my crooked teeth, to let my hair be wild and loose, to live without succumbing to the judgment of presenting my femininity in an immaculate position.

 

I sat on my bed as the credits were rolling

As I realized that I loved color because of its scientific purpose on this world, not because it made me happy to tell the person in the waiting room that today, yellow is my favorite color because I saw a yellow sun drawn with chalk on the sidewalk and I thought it was pretty.

I realized that I sat in my college dorm pursuing a dream because it was expectant of me, unable to recall that as a child I cried watching Free Willy and it made me want to free all of the whales held in captivity.

 

I sat in the corner of my bed frowning at the realization that it took a movie I watched at twenty years old to realize that I was no longer a child

But there was a small spark of hope, a tiny seed planted into my heart in hopes of becoming my own rose

A hope where I scrambled to find scraps of memories indicating that my adulthood is being shaped by the wonder I felt as a child, not because it was something that people anticipated of me

 

I learned to realize that just maybe, I can remember what it was like before I forgot