I miss a lot of things. I miss paying attention to small things, the way only a child can. I miss sleeping in one of my two pyjamas with pictures of airplanes printed on the chest (a green helicopter and black fighter jet), and pretending to pilot them before I sleep. Lying in bed allowed me to imagine the tight cocoon of my cover around me as the cockpit, albeit one that is horizontal, but that’s only because it was so sophisticated.
I miss noticing the patterns in tiles, and skipping from white one to white one, and feeling genuine disappointment when the pattern had to be deserted, because the pattern has changed (and nothing can be done about that), or my legs aren’t long enough to reach the next acceptable tile. I miss monitoring my teachers’ toilet-going habits, and, as ridiculous as it was, thinking to myself, “Wow, they’re humans too.”
I miss the things I remembered, and the things I didn’t deign to. I miss remembering that Voltron was on at 1 pm on Friday, and how missing that was as unforgivable, and other things of equally unimportance. I miss watching the spiders in fifth grade, and carrying them around in emptied water bottles, and picking them up in my hands, and feeling the accomplishment counterbalanced by fear that “they’re poisonous” or “they’ll crawl inside your body if they find an opening”—and I miss how credulous I was, and how that last especially was believable.
I miss understanding things. The day I found out about the nature of procreation, it was physical education class, and we were separated into lines of mildly interested ten-year-olds doing jumping exercises. A precocious “friend,” designated so because he wasn’t much of one yet and would never graduate to my roughly defined definition of friendship, explained to me about male and female organs. I remember feeling incredulous, and for about a year I remained extremely skeptical. It seemed too barbaric, certainly something unbefitting of the joyous fulfillment spoken of it. Time has, naturally, erased every shred of the incredulity: I learned that both are true.
I miss the time when I didn’t know that childhood would end and I’d want to write it a nostalgic love letter to growing up.
By Ahmed Samir
