I Was Very, Very Little

I'm not old.

Sometimes, I think that I am. Because of the way the kids around me act. But then I see that there are so many people who are older than me, so many people that understand more about the world than I do, and I realize that I'm actually quite young. I forget, though, when I think about how different things were when I was little.

I was born in [XXXX, my same trick I did for Child from the Past], and back then, things were so different. Firstly, I don't think there was as much political jabbering. Or maybe I just never paid attention to it.

Technology was much simpler. I remember watching Dora the Explorer on a big, fat TV. It's a memory I hold close to my heart, because now there are no big, fat TVs. Now there are just flat ones that are getting thin as paper.

And as a kid, I wasn't immediately given my own phone. I wasn't allowed to do whatever I wanted on YouTube or search up random things on Google. I don't even know if I'm allowed to do that now.

But that has made me who I am today. I see what damage has been done to the kids around me at school and realized that I wasn't "protected" like certain people say I was; I wasn't "shielded" too much from the world around me. I was disciplined. And disciplined just right.

For me, life was simple when I was little. I would get up every day and run down the stairs and ask my brother if he could get the cereal out of the kitchen cabinet for me (because the cereal was on the second shelf and I couldn't reach it). Then, I would eat cereal at the table and watch the Powerpuff Girls. Or Dexter's Laboratory. Some of my favorite shows as a kid.

There was one day in particular that changed my whole life.

It was some time in winter, because I remember snow. The day before, or the week before, or some time before that, I had heard that there were these two kids down the street that were just me and my brother's age. My brother was born in [XXXX], and so was the kid down the street. He had a younger sister who was only a year older than me.

I asked my brother if he could ask that kid if his little sister would play with me. Because I was a shy little kid. I didn't want to go up to someone and ask them myself.

So it's the next day, and it's wintery outside, and I'm all bundled up in my big pink coat and several pairs of socks and leggings and a shirt. I go outside, my brother with me, and we walk around the street a bit. There was an alleyway between all of our houses- we lived in Kentucky, at the time, in a very nice, friendly town- and we walked all the way down to the alleyway by the kid's house.

His name was Sean. He and my brother became great friends. I'm fairly certain that they both still are.

Once I made it around the corner, I saw that Sean had this little girl standing next to him. Immediately, I was confused. Is that his sister? Isn't she supposed to be older then me? How come she's shorter than me and yet she's older?

She looked over at me once I entered the small alley. I remember a moment where we looked at each other. I distinctly, to this day, recall that she was wearing a fluffy coat and a scarf to go with it. And maybe a hat to go on top, but the memory's old by now, and it's lost most of its flair.

My brother had done some work with Sean. He had brought his sister with him when he came outside, after all.

And I asked her what her name was, and she said Kayla. Or it must have gone that way, because we would not know each other's names if she had not told me and I had not told her.

I still remember wondering about how in the world she was older than me and yet shorter than me.

From then on, we became friends. She'd come over to my house and we would trade toys. I'd ride over to her house every day on my scooter and wait for her to finish her homework. She was, after all, in first grade, and I was only in kindergarten. I was also homeschooled, so I didn't know that homework was a thing.

Once she was finished, we'd go upstairs and play. Her brother and her shared a room, which I thought was odd. One of the rooms was an office, one was her parents' bedroom, and the other, she shared with Sean.

I found that confusing. We didn't have an office. My brother had a bedroom and so did I. Though it was very small.

A couple years back, maybe in 2020 or so, I had a dream that I returned to my old house in Kentucky. I had a dream that all of my toys were still there- the giant Beanie Boos and the Enderman plushie and the wooden bed that I had broken while jumping on- and I gathered them up and was going to play with them again.

But Kayla wasn't there, so there was no point.

We continued to be friends. We played every day. We would ride our scooters in fashion with out friend Nem all the way down to the cul-de-sac (I think that's how you type it) and back again. One time, I found blue robin eggs and picked them up, soon getting in trouble for even having them in the first place. But it was still a memory made.

I broke my elbow in the playground behind our house. My brother was out playing with his friends and I wanted to climb the monkey bars.

I fell.

The "protective padding" of the playground did not protect me. I broke my elbow, put a teeny weeny crack in one of the smallest bones I had ever seen, and had to wear a hot pink cast for half a year. Kayla was one of the first ones to sign it. She put a heart on the Y of her name.

We grew up together. It was only two years, but I remember those two years better than anything else in my life. I remember waiting at the bus stop in the rain, sitting next to her on the bus, sometimes even peeking into her classroom when I had gone out to get a drink of water to see if I could see her.

I never could. I still tried. And I was never caught.

Two years, we spent together. Growing up as the best friends of all time.

One time, I remember, I moved my foot- we were drawing together on the porch of my house- and it ruined her whole drawing. Then she yelled at me and grabbed her scooter and went home, she was so upset.

I had no idea why she was so mad. Her drawing wasn't messed up. There was a tiny smudge, but other than that, why was she freaking out about it?

I remember that she wrote me a seriously angry letter. And I was so frustrated about the fact that she was so frustrated and that she wrote me an angry letter that I tried to write her one back. It was on a piece of white printer paper in thick purple marker.

Then my mom told me that I had no reason to write her an angry letter. It would only make the both of us more angry, she said.

So I reluctantly didn't write it. Kayla remained mad at me for only one day longer and then the feeling of anger disappeared and we became complete friends again. We used to staple together notecards and create stories with them. And we used to draw things and carry stickers with us, going around and asking everyone in the neighborhood- that we knew, anyway- which one of us had the best drawing.

Now, they all gave us five stars each, so as not to make any of us feel bad.

Then the day came when we had to move away.

It was sometime in the end of 2017. Santa came early that year, bringing our Christmas presents earlier than he usually would. I asked my parents, and my parents asked Kayla's parents, and we had what I like to call our Last-Day Sleepover.

To this day, she swears she hardly remembers any of it. But I remember it all, so very vividly, and it was probably the greatest night and morning of my life.

First, we played with toys. We knelt down and pretended to be cats and messed around with our favorite Beanie Boos. Then we played Minecraft, where we discovered that you could stay in bed for a very long time if you set the Daylight Cycle rule to false and set the time to night. We built two treehouses and laid out a storyline where a red panda found a strange black creature with a white screen for a head. This "strange creature" was actually very sick, and the red panda tried to heal it.

I remember sitting on her parents' bed and playing games on that large-screen TV to this day.

Then, her dad brought us pizza, and we stayed up very late- I think it was around 10 o'clock, which was three hours later than my bedtime at the time- eating and playing Minecraft. I remember feeling tired and not wanting to go to sleep.

Kayla and I made books. Since she did not have a stapler, we taped a bunch of pieces of paper together and made a book. Hers was Santa and the Penguin, a story about how a penguin was rescued by Santa Clause and ate all of his cookies and milk.

I made one called the Elf and the Penguin, and she offered to help draw the parts that were "really hard," like a door opening from a certain angle or the penguin nodding his head inside of a cage.

It was time to go to bed. Early in the morning, I woke up. I'm not sure if Kayla was awake yet, but I strapped on my shoes and left the house. I don't remember if we ever got to say goodbye to each other. Maybe she was awake, and maybe we hugged, or something, but... I don't know.

I just remember riding away in the car, the UHaul truck behind us.

It was almost a year later before she came and suddenly visited me in West Virginia.

That is the day I will never forget.

Her and her parents rolled up to the house in their green Jeep, and she stepped out of the car and I shouted her name and I remember picking her up in a hug. Though she had grown by then. Just a smidgen taller than she was.

It was a sleepover a few days after my birthday in the beginning of July. We played Minecraft, built this enormous world with a theater and two statues of us (that I still have), and then we went into my room to draw.

She was incredible at drawing.

My eyes were fascinated. She had gone from what a seven-year-old normally draws to what I used to draw in sixth grade. She drew me a photo in blue pen that I still have today. My heart wrenches when I see it. It reminds me of sitting next to her by my desk- this very desk that I'm using right now, quite frankly- and watching her draw while I could do nothing but hold my pencil in shock.

I asked her how she got so good at drawing.

She said "I practice in class sometimes."

To this day, that amazes me. She practiced in class- and has been practicing since then, now her art looks professional to me- and she got that good? Over the course of maybe a year and a half?

She drew me another thing, too. The two of us together as angels with halos, BFFs written above our heads in big, bright letters. I have it hanging up on my wall now.

A few months back from 2023, she redrew that picture. And it looks incredible.

We went to sleep that night, and I remember her waking up to get a glass of water. I remember only staring at the ceiling and hearing someone shuffle out in the hallway. And it was her, because she had woken up at night and was thirsty.

In the morning, we listened to music, did a little bit of dancing, and played around outside. This was back when we lived in what I call the Red House, because... well, it was red, and it was a house. It was pretty big, too. I loved that old house.

Except we never had warm water and the rent was too high for a place thats water was always cold. It's why we moved out.

We played outside. It's all I remember. And I remember eating steak for dinner because it was July 5th and playing Minecraft together, finishing up the enormous theater we had built, and then she had to go.

I watched the Jeep until it pulled out of the driveway and rode all the way down the gravel path. I watched through all the windows till I couldn't see it anymore.

That changed my life.

Another two years later, I started talking with Kayla again. She could animate, then, and draw, and she had discovered this new game that she loved and she told me all about. We talked and talked and talked and talked. All the time.

She was in South Korea by then. The difference in time zones struck me. I didn't like having to stay up late to talk to her. I didn't like that we couldn't talk at 3 when I got home from school.

Then... during 2020, she stopped answering me. She just stopped.

April of '21 is when we started to talk again.

Since then, Kayla has been with me. Improving my writing skills with her commentary. Drawing exceptional things. Dealing with my sometimes emotional responses to things, occasionally arguing. Being friends.

Who knows, maybe we really are BFFs. Best Friends Forever. So far nothing has come in the way to separate us.

But I won't assume things. Maybe one day she'll come to West Virginia, or maybe just Virginia, and I'll get to see her again. Or maybe one day, I'll fly across the world and see her. I've had dreams about that, really. I've dreamt of it.

My friend... she's changed my whole life.

Ever since that snowy day in Kentucky, she's changed my life.

To Kayla.

***

to kayla,

if you happen to find this post, you matter a whole lot to me. i know you're out there somewhere, and i hope to see you again someday.

x hearts