What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only its today. And you don't feel eleven at all. You feel like you're still ten. And you are- underneath the year that makes you eleven.
Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you need to sit on your mother's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's still five. And maybe one day when you're all grown up maybe you will need to cry like you're three, and that's okay. That's what I tell my mother when she's sad and needs to cry. Maybe you're feeling three.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like those little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. Thats how being eleven years old is.
You don't feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say "Eleven" when they ask you. And you don't feel smart eleven, not until you're almost twelve. That's just the way it is.
When I think of how I see myself it would have to be at age eleven. I know I'm nineteen on the outside, but inside I'm eleven. I'm the girl in the picture with skinny arms and an ironed skirt and crinkled hair. I didn't like school because all they saw was the outside me. School was lots of rules and sitting with your hands folded and being very quiet all the time. I liked looking out the window and thinking. I liked staring at the girl across the way writing her name over and over again in red ink. I wondered why the boy with the dirty collar in front of me didn't have a mother who took better care of him.
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