Growing Pains
I cannot remember exactly when she went away. When she got lost.
Her brightly coloured scribbles on the walls were coated with a fresh coat of paint and I grew out of all the clothes she used to wear.
At first I did not miss her, or perhaps I did not really know she was gone, too focused on the future to reflect upon the past.
I cannot remember precisely when I first felt her absence. Perhaps when I saw the friends she once had change and leave me behind. Perhaps it was the first time I ever felt unsure of myself.
When unfamiliar feelings planted themselves between my lungs, I could not help but envy the girl ignorant to all but the dreams in her head.
I knew I could not bring her back and even if I could I would not want to. She will always be fearless and untameable, blessed with naivety and excitement. She will remain a memory, a fragment of time.
Yet sometimes I find it hard to believe she is gone for I see her everywhere I go.
I see her in grazed knees bandaged with pink plasters, in grass-stained books and wild daisies.
I see her in tea parties with teddy bears and pretend cakes.
When I look into the mirror, I recognise her within the person I see.
She did not go away, she is still there,
She is the girl I was and will always be.
by Ali Bryan
Growing Pains, which I think was one of my favourite poems of all the poems that I read in this process. I really love to write a nice long poetic line so when you said ‘how brightly coloured scribbles on the walls were coated with a fresh coat of paint and I grew out of all the clothes she used to wear,’ it feels like sometimes people are really born? with the sentences they make and they stay safe and I think the longer a sentence gets it’s a bit like going out on a limb of a branch on a tree, the further out you get the riskier it becomes. And it takes real bravery to write a big long sentence to go where you went with this poem. I love the way you dug deep in to your own experience and you retrieved your younger more innocent self. She did not go away, she is still there, she is the girl I was and will always will be.’ In the lament for what we lose we hold on to it too. We can be sad to have left our childhood selves behind but the great thing is they never leave us, it’s like that joke we are all like Russian dolls, we are all full of ourselves. And inside the mature, or more mature or older Ali Bryan is this young, hopeful, playful child who holds in her all the potential to be the great things. And you’ve retrieved her, you’ve gone back in this poem to save her from oblivion and to keep her with you. And it’s like inner child therapy, it’s this process where somebody looks back at something that happened in their life and they go back as their adult self to save the little child, so it’s like time travel in therapy. Your ability to do that for yourself in this poem is a really great achievement and a brilliant sign of maturity. Well done Ali.