I have 11 months until adulthood, and while I crave the independence that will come with July 22nd, I also can’t help but feel as though my childhood is ending at a rate quicker than I can cope with, and I don’t know how to put my feelings into sentences that will make sense.

It feels as though the sun is setting on my childhood.

The different shades of pink are the color of my walls from the ages of zero to eight. They watched me grow into the thoughts in my head and the voice I now use to share my thoughts. The walls supported shelves upon shelves of books that fueled my love of reading, and the drapes hung slightly below the popcorn ceiling that coated the roof of my room. 

It’s the color of my favorite pair of tennis shoes that I’d wear to chase my siblings around our backyard and the color of the tulips my mom always planted out front to add a pop of color to our yellow-sided house. 

The purple that slowly bleeds into the night sky filled with stars is all the nights my father spent catching fireflies to show me. He’d poke holes in the top of plastic containers—we’d go through several containers a summer. The container would be set on my bedroom dresser, and my father would gently wake me up and patiently wait for me to name the lightning bug filling my room with light. In the morning, we’d release him back into the world to find his friends once again.

And the yellow that peaks out around the edges of the sun highlights the very same star that watched as I learned to ride my bike around the neighborhood. It was the same star that watched my father push me on the swings to an altitude that allowed me to brush my toes against the maple tree next to our swing set. I adored the idea of being able to touch the clouds. 

The blue hues that are just barely visible are comparable to the eyes of the little girl who wanted to know everything about anything she could get her hands on. She’s grown out of her love of dresses and her collection of bows, but her blue eyes remain striking. Some days they seem to be a matching set to her father’s and on others, they reflect the sky before a storm passes through.

She has ideas in her head that she now knows are worthy of sharing, and she tries to no longer overthink before she takes leaps. She’s grown gracefully into her love of words, and she uses her blue eyes to encapsulate everything around her in picture form so she can place them in a filing cabinet in her mind for later use. 

Like a sunset, my childhood is cemented in old photographs my mom’s scrapped together for books and placed around our house. And like a sunset, I look upon the photos fondly, but I know I must appreciate the beauty in front of me instead of the sun that has sank behind the horizon and left nothing but stars behind.

And while sunsets have always represented the end, they have also come to represent change.

I’ve grown out of my pink Croc tennis shoes and late night dreams fueled by fireflies. In doing so, I’ve attempted to make change a friend of mine. I now watch the sun dip behind the horizon out of car windows and watch the light slowly retract itself from my room as the afternoon bleeds into evening. 

I have 11 months until adulthood, 11 months to befriend change, and 11 more months of watching sunsets through my childhood window.