Andrew Alt

As my life becomes more and more about the future, I continue to think back to the little girl who got me here.

I am sitting criss-cross applesauce on a coarse, well-worn rug in a kindergarten classroom.

I can see the sun filtering through the window into my teacher’s hair as she reads poems to us.

Oh, the places you’ll go.

Someday, it’ll be a cliché; it’ll be a semi-overdone graduation gift that makes mothers cry and younger sisters roll their eyes in performative boredom.

Right now, it’s only a poem. It’s a looking-glass into a future that I have yet to imagine. It’s the very beginning of a promise in which I hold no stake.

Right now, I am zoning out and staring at the birds instead of listening to the cadence of my teacher’s speech. I don’t care about all the places I’ll go; I only care about where I am: in a classroom that is loud in a way that only a place with 30 five-year-olds can be, even when they’re not speaking, with my best friend’s fingers tracing patterns on my back.

Oh, the places you’ll go.

I don’t know how to grow up. I don’t know how I’ve made it this far. All I know is that my once shoulder-length hair now reaches my waist, and I can’t for the life of me remember when it got that long.

I don’t know how to grow up, and yet I keep doing it. One moment, I am five, sitting on a shape-strewn carpet with sunlight illuminating the unsettled dust in the air, then I turn to laugh at my best friend’s joke, and she’s gone, and we haven’t spoken in years, and it’s the beginning of my senior year, and it’s been a decade since I’ve sat in a classroom like that one.

But there have been more that I’ve loved just as much. With music in the speakers and my friends’ voices emanating softly from all corners of the room, I can feel the echo of my childhood self sitting beside me.

I am suffocated by anticipatory nostalgia.

I know now what I didn’t know then: I will not be sitting forever in this classroom with my best friends. I have a whole life ahead of me—one I couldn’t be more excited for—but I still can’t find it in myself to look past where I am right now: in another sunlit classroom full of love, poetry, and the youth I know I will long for in the future.

Oh, the places you’ll go.

It’s not just a poem anymore, and it’s far from something I can laugh off as a cliché.

Less than a year from now, I will be the one receiving that book. I only have ten months to sit beside the friends and acquaintances that I haven’t existed without since those long afternoons in that sunny kindergarten classroom.

I know that wherever I end up, I will be happy. I know that I will make friends whom I love with my entire being. I know that my future will be laden with new memories and inside jokes and favorite places, but I don’t want to leave yet. I’m not ready. I still don’t know how to grow up.

I’m not ready to discover all the places I’ll go if it means leaving behind the life I have created here. Each of my moments are tinged with a lingering, futuristic sense of nostalgia. I am already missing the life I live now.

I am a ghost; I am an echo of the girl I will become.

I am sitting criss-cross applesauce on the hardwood floor of an abstract future, watching myself, older now, laughing as her friend traces patterns on her back.