The Girl Before the Tides

I sat down today intending to write about Christmas morning.

I was five years old.

In the memory, my brother is sneaking down the hallway before sunrise to see if Santa came. My grandparents are asleep on the hide-a-bed in the living room. I’m trying to sneak out behind him without anyone noticing.

There is a pink and white bicycle waiting beside the Christmas tree.

It’s a happy memory.

And somehow, today, writing it hurt.

That’s one of the things I didn’t expect when I started writing childhood memories The Girl Before the Tides.

I knew there would be difficult memories to write. I knew there were parts of my childhood that would be painful to revisit.

I didn’t realize the happy memories could hurt too.

When I write these early chapters, I have to return to the world exactly as I understood it then. I can’t give that little girl everything I know now.

She simply loves her family.

She trusts the people around her.

She worries about getting in trouble. She fights with her brother. She carries a stuffed dog named Puppy everywhere. She twirls in pretty dresses, plays Barbies on her bedroom floor, and waits impatiently for Santa.

Her world is the only version of it she knows.

But I’m not five anymore.

I know things about the people in those memories that she didn’t know. I understand relationships differently. Some of the people I thought I knew aren’t quite the people I believed they were.

And I’ve realized that writing this book is giving me space to grieve that.

Not necessarily the loss of the people themselves.

Sometimes it’s the loss of who I thought they were.

There’s a strange kind of grief in discovering that you can miss something that may never have existed quite the way you remember it.

But I don’t want to take those memories away from the little girl who lived them.

If Christmas morning was magical to her, then it gets to be magical on the page.

If she loved someone, she gets to love them.

If she felt safe in a moment, I’m not going to reach backward with everything I know now and tell her she shouldn’t have.

Her memories belong to her.

Today, though, I realized I needed to stop writing.

The pink and white bicycle will still be waiting beside the Christmas tree when I come back.

And maybe that’s part of writing this story too.

Knowing when to close the page for a little while.