When the World Was Still Growing With Me: Adolescence: My Transition...
I don’t remember the exact moment I stopped being a child. But I remember the slow ache of growing up. It was like watching your favorite tree lose its last leaf, quiet, inevitable, and suddenly bare. Adolescence didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in, clumsy and uninvited, whispering that nothing would ever be the same. Back then, time didn’t tick, it stretched. A Saturday afternoon could feel like a lifetime. I'd lie on the roof of our old shed, arms behind my head, watching clouds move like silent ships across the sky. I didn’t know where I was going, but I was sure the sky did. My sneakers had holes in them, my heart had a thousand questions, and t".e world, oh, the world still felt like it was expanding with me. There was a wonder in everything. In the way shadows changed shape in the evening. In the way your name sounded when the right person said it. Even the pain had a purity to it. A rawness that meant you were alive, becoming. Middle school was a blur of loud hallwa...