i can’t believe i grew up. 

i didn’t even know it was happening when it was.

i just thought childhood was over and i didn’t feel anything anymore.

i’m not even that old, but i know i’ve gotten older because i look at little kids now and i can’t relate. not even to teenagers. i’ve already forgotten what it’s like. i just look at them and think how amazing these tiny people are. how incredible they are to withstand exposure to constant new experiences and challenges and changes in themselves.

i spent 2 hours today with a sassy, smart eight year old girl. for 1 hour she showed me everything she had in her room. she showed me her diary and i told her to write in it everyday. because she’s going to forget in a couple of years what its like to be isabel, eight years old. she showed me her garden and taught me what fruit each tree bore. there was a fairy ornament in her lawn and i gasped really exaggerated-like and asked if she knew the fairy. she tried to act all suave and say she didn’t believe in fairies. i made a big show of disgust and told her a fairy is crying somewhere, that i believed in fairies and that i always had. after she showed me more flowers she introduced me to lili, her personal fairy  in her garden. i questioned why she said she didn’t believe in fairies before and she said she thought since i was old i wouldn’t believe in them and she wanted to be old like me. 

i feel bad, you know? for telling her something exists when it doesn’t. she’s going to feel betrayed one day. but then i realized that the fairies don’t exist because i said they do, they exist because she had already invented fairies in her head, named them, dreamt of them. do we all create fairies? do they exist because we’re told they exist? if we all dream of them, do we get their image from the same part of our imagination…or do they really exist?