She is the glimpse of apricity, the awakening into a world alight with every bliss imaginable. She chases each shimmering notion through the fields.
Her little braided pigtails rebelliously stray into loose strands and flop carelessly in the wind. The pink hair-ties unfurl and slide off, the playground of her hair growing sleek from the sweat of the summer.
She is a bird—daring the limits of the sky.
She is a canoe—journeying through untouched murky waters.
She is abandon—rushing through the tangled roots of her blissful smiles.
She is the exhilaration of a loud moment, one that’ll make you think fondly on the grayest of days. She is young, but she doesn’t care. If anything, she is happy for this. She has no burdens of the elderly and wise. She does as she pleases, and no one bats an eye, for she is just a child.
And so, she runs her hands across the flowery tops of the wild grass blades as she dances through the open field. The green tickles her palms and bleeds into her flying soul. She is amongst the clouds, akin to the stars.
Sometimes, her aura radiates with such ferocity, you might mistake her for one of her glittery friends; the sky’s nighttime jewels shine with similar ebullience.
She is content with her youth, because of her youth, for her youth, making it all the more disheartening to see a darkened reflection in an undiscovered alcove of a suspicious pond. There, she meets a new face, one of age, one of wisdom, one of burdens.

There, she meets this stranger with longer and tidier hair, warm and loving eyes, a mellow and distant smile. There, she greets a newcomer who wears the very embodiment of her most glaring fear, a transition, a journey she never wanted to embark upon.
She lets her braids sink towards the water, dipping slightly to touch their older selves. She doesn’t want to look to the sky, where she had once let her inspirations soar, reign-free. She doesn’t want to look upon the heights she used to be able to reach for. She doesn’t want to see the remnants of her past that now stand so separate from the present. She doesn’t want to see that she no longer lives in that past. She doesn’t want to leave the moment.
She’s frozen, scared of the cold of winter. She would stare into the sun forever if it meant she could forget the time slipping away from her. She chases this shimmering notion of dancing through the fields as she sits as stagnant as the water before her.
She chases it all the way, running until she finds that in doing so she has left the very moment she longed to live in forever.