I Waved Goodbye to Yesterday as Tomorrow Took Me By the Hand

I was looking through old pictures of my parents back in the 80's, and then the 90's when my sister and I were born. There were some pictures that made me laugh, some pictures that made me remember, some pictures that made me want to cry. Sometimes I forget all the memories I've had with my family. Looking back, those days seem like another life, the girl I saw in the pictures wasn't me, I didn't recognize her. She was a small, delicate, boyish-looking girl and I noticed the way she smiled, like every day she fell in love with the world all over again. A new soul--not yet spoiled. Naive yet so oblivious, and all I could think was,

that use to be me.

The 1980's never seemed so sweet till that night. I wish I could've been a stranger passing my parents by on the street back then; young love, people would call it. Seeing them together, I imagine, would be something like magic. My mom was glowing, a young woman with a smile that was like meeting beautiful for the first time. There was a light to her, one that I have never had the chance to see for as long as I've been old enough to remember. Back then, she was free. And then there was my dad, so obviously in love, it was written all over his face. Scrawny and goofy but handsome in his own right, I could see he brought out something romantic in my mom, something that had been completely foreign to her until she met my dad.

And I wonder if I ruined it. If time ruined it.

I wonder if I grew up too fast. If I turned out to be what my parents always imagined their daughter to be. If they're still happy together, 25-years and 2 kids later. If in the end they'd say: I'd go back and do it all over again. If later on in the future I'd say the same. One of these days I'll have grown up into a woman and my childhood will seem even further away, my parents a little older every year, and I wonder how I'll find my way back to the beginning, to the place I grew up, to the people I have never stopped loving. But then again something tells me I will.

To mom and dad, for all the times you never gave up on me, I hope to be living proof that for the past seventeen years and all the years to come, your hard work and dedication raising me from a little girl to a young lady was and will never be in vain.