The Girl Who Never Grew Up

One day I came home from kindergarten with something growing behind my front tooth that was bugging my gums. 

"You're losing your baby teeth, Sweetie, you're growing in your adult teeth." My mother said. 

I burst into tears. This meant I was growing older, and that I would have to be an adult and do adult things. 

I knew this at age five. 

Now, all my adult teeth are here, straightened by braces in junior high. High school felt like forever, but now that has passed as well, and I am now going to be starting my first year of college next week. 

Why did I cry at age five for receiving my first adult tooth? Because I wasn't Peter Pan, and I knew that everything that was right now solid in my life, would eventually change. And it did. 

Over the years, I stood still in this crazy life and looked around, just like Ferris Bueller said to do. 

But this summer, I've seemed to have done it more times than ever. 

It started with the end of my Senior year. A closed chapter on a twelve year story. 

Next, it was the death of my grandmother. A closed chapter on the life of a wonderful woman that I loved very dearly. 

And coming this weekend, I will move out of my parents house for the first time. A closed chapter on my childhood. 

The five year old Lauren inside is freaking out.  

But the eighteen year old Lauren is taking a deep breath. 

Today, I said "see ya later" to one my best friends, but before then, we laughed and giggled, and reminisced about all the dumb stuff we've done over the years while playing our favorite kid game, Uno. And on the way back home, I cried, because another chapter had closed. 

But you know what? While some memories are not written down in hard-covered book like stories to be retold like Peter Pan, we can still reopen them.  

I don't know the end of this novel, but I do know the moral.

Time waits for no one. 

Not Peter Pan, not my grandmother, and certainly not me. 

Things are crazy right now, but I'm so glad that these chapters occurred, and they will never be closed unless I somehow forget. 

And I wont.