Who Am I Now?

Once in a blue moon I stumble back across this blog; this little corner of the great wide web that I used to call my own. 

I could spend hours scrolling back through old posts, as if I could manipulate time in my fingertips and a few clicks is all I need to touch the past. It plays on my heartstrings to be reading words I wrote not so long ago yet that feel like they were shouted from the other side of a great abyss. I read stories and look at photographs that are me and yet not me all at once, for I do not recognise myself in them anymore. 

Each time I visit this place I feel as though I am in mourning for the girl with the heart on fire. Who used to dance in morning fog and make crowns from twigs and leaves. I look at this time capsule of creations, photographs, videos and words and I am grateful that I have them here to remember her by.

Somewhere in the tangled mess of growing up I have left more of this girl behind than I would have wanted to, and I feel the empty space that she has left in me more keenly than I wish to say. I do not know if this is what happens to us all as we grow; that we leave behind pieces of ourselves that were once so completely interwoven with who we were.

But she is still here, like a perfectly preserved flower between the pages of a book. Waiting to slip gently out the next time they are opened.