Note: the passages written in italics were written when I was 15 (I am now 23). I am responding to that piece of writing with an updated piece, written now, in adulthood. Trigger warnings: abuse implied.

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Here’s the childhood I should have had:

I’m in Michigan and I’m playing with the frogs in the pond. My hands are wet, but not with pain; a frog jumps into my hand and lets me touch it. The water soaks my dress. In this childhood, I can wear dresses and sandals without pain. In this childhood, my dress has flowers on it and no blood-stains. I’m in Michigan and it’s hotter than the Arizona summer. My parents say that it’s the humidity, or some other big word, but in my mind I make up a story. In the story, the clouds comfort the sun as the sun cries and cries. I don’t understand what crying is like.

In this childhood, I get a haircut in the middle of my great aunt’s backyard. Michigan has grass that you can roll in, and trees that you can climb, and tire swings that you can swing from even when you’re too big and your legs hurt. Michigan has lakes that get you wet, like playing with a frog pond in an untainted childhood. In Michigan, I put my swimsuit on and I make homes for the tadpoles in the lake.

The childhood I should have had bleeds through the book. The childhood I should have had: excavated from its grave, pulled out and dusted off and revered. Bowed to. This is a priceless stage of life, I am told. It cannot be replaced.

I’m supposed to remember it, but I have beaten my mourning up, I have given it a bloody mouth like patient sacrifice and I have given it up to a better family like a miraculous untimely birth and I have drowned it in the school bathroom toilets and I’m not even going to get punished for it! I feel like I’ve betrayed all that I have ever been, because I have only ever been the little girl king, the created and too-soon-weaponized, the concept of forced and force and how we all know the little d at the end of these words will never put any of it in past tense. I was not supposed to rule this city. I was supposed to have a childhood during the years I was writing about not having a childhood, lacking the ability to grasp my own youth at the time. Long ago I was hunted down and taxidermied into the role of an adult and now at the age of twenty three whole years I am a child again.

“Soon,” I say to the tadpoles in the water, “you will grow up. Tell me what being old is like, okay?”

In this childhood, Michigan is still my home. My grandparents take me into the forest and we have a picnic. In this childhood, I come home from the lake. When you leave the house, there is a path across the street that goes straight to Lake Michigan. My wet feet in my sandals make noises as I walk; in this childhood, the one that was stolen from me, I walk and hum and I don’t think about the monsters and wild animals that could be hiding in the woods. In the green trees. In the plants that you don’t see in Arizona, because Arizona is a desert and everything that I grow dies, even in the childhood that I should have had. It’s symbolic. It’s my hands touching the dry ground and placing a plant inside of it. It’s the plant dying days later. It’s my hands with burns on them from the hot ground, and my knees with blood on them, and my childhood dead in the backyard.

Michigan freezes me in December and burns me in the summer—on June 27, when I am supposed to embrace another year of age, it is too hot out to do anything. I know what being old is like—my body is crusting up and sagging, decaying alive, the flesh that is me scattered like seeds across the land for everyone to harvest something bountiful from, the only form in which I am now useful. I know what being old is like. Once I was a little tadpole and then, in the midst of a blink and between the metal collision of that car crash, I became, too fast, something prehistoric, megalodon-vast in the shallow seas. I am too ancient, time stuffed up inside of me like plush innards, my presence a well-loved toy forgotten on the shelf.

I know what being old is like, and in my adulthood I finally know what being young is like. We aren’t near Lake Michigan, but I can walk a block into the forest and that’s enough, that’s something, right? Tell me, little girl, if I have given you enough, if I have made it all okay. Tell me I can be young now.