June 4, 2015
Whenever I see pictures of how much my hair has grown in x amount of time, it gives me pause. Time is such a strange phenomenon. Hair growing longer is, for me, a picture of the reality that time does, indeed, pass. I was telling a friend last night that I still feel like I’m 16 and should be driving down an old logging road Friday night after the football game to find a creek and sleep under stars for the weekend with my buddies. I also feel like I’m still ten and it’s midnight and I’m under a blanket with a flashlight reading an entire Harry Potter book through the night because my dad took me to Barnes and Noble to get it when they released it at 9.
I saw a picture of “Neville Longbottom” (Matthew Lewis) last night, and thought to myself: “WOAH, HE SURE GREW UP FAST!” And then I realized…wait, we were kids together. I was a kid watching him as a kid on the Big Screen. Does that mean *I* look like a grown-up now too?!? Because in my mind, I’m still an eleven year old little girl and I’ve got a crush on “Neville all grown up.” I feel like time passed in his life, maybe, but not in mine.
But alas. I am not ten or eleven or sixteen. I’m twenty-two. It’s as if one day I just woke up and Adulthood was like “HERE I AM! You won’t feel any different inside but I’m telling you you’re different. Little kids look UP to you (and up *at* you) as if you’re not one of them.”
It’s the same phenomenon that happened when I was helping my parents move a couple weeks ago and was up late one night going through my “box of letters.” I was trying to figure out which ones to keep for a while longer and which ones were okay to part with. Buried in a stack was an old envelope from “Soldier Matthew.”
When I was 7 or 8, my teacher had us write letters to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wrote one to “Soldier Matthew,” and he replied. He said it was the first he’d ever replied to, on tour. I was so excited to have gotten a letter from a real live soldier. I kept it, tucked away among the stacks, for all these years. I never forgot him–in my mind he was always this Hero–so much older than me, so much wiser, so much more learned.
So a few weeks back when I was digging through the stacks and re-discovered the envelope addressed in his handwriting, I opened it up. “Dear Jordan, I’m twenty years old and am currently in Afghanistan…”
I stopped there.
Wait. TWENTY? That is two years YOUNGER than I am right now. When sent this, I was a little girl in elementary school, and now I’m two years older than he was when he wrote it. That means he’s in his FORTIES now. I feel like a kid, and I’m 22. HE WAS ONLY 20.
It was strange rediscovering that letter after all these years and realizing how much time has passed since he penned its words. And how I’m no longer a seven year old girl heroizing a twenty year old soldier…I’m now a 22 year old woman reading correspondence from a man who may now have kids of his own.
I wonder if he’s still alive. I wonder if he made it home. I wonder if he’s married. I wonder if he remembers writing a little 2nd grade girl in white keds who wore matching bows and sundresses.
Crazy.
missjordanjean 