i write, you read

In my memory, a 13-year-old version of myself still sits in the low fork of the peppercorn tree of our old backyard.

This version of me was blonde. Freckled, with legs too long and a scar on her mouth that she couldn’t yet cover with lipstick. On weekends she nearly always wore faded denim overalls and a striped green t-shirt that she fancied made her look like Kurt Cobain. She was a dreamer, a romantic. Even then.

Her fraying sneakers would dangle over the branch as she spent her afternoons reading. She read everything she could get her hands on. Science fiction in the form of Lovecraft and Matheson and one Stephen King novel taken from Dad’s shelf that she knew she was much too young for. Fantasy, namely Brian Jaques’ Mossflower and Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and countless detective stories by Christie and Conan Doyle. She devoured books. She made her way through a thick, cloth-bound collection of stories by Poe, loved Orwell and Dickens and Austen, and though she didn’t fully grasp it on the first read, even Jostien Gaarder’s Sophie’s World was finished within a week. A lot of what she read was probably not suitable for a girl of her age, but she found that when an adult saw you with a book they didn’t tend to worry so much about what it contained. They were just glad to see you reading.

Her hair, which went nearly down to her waist, would sometimes get in her eyes as she read, and she would shake it away, listening to the sound of magpies calling. The swoosh of the neighbors pigeons making their slow circles overhead came like clockwork, every afternoon at five. In the dwindling light the book would sink to her lap and she would daydream.

She thought she would like to be an actor, or a writer, or a detective, or a scientist. She didn’t mind which. She just wanted to understand people. She wanted to understand how things work and why people think the way they do. She wanted to understand cause and effect and how all of the mysteries of the world could be traced back to their beginnings by unraveling them like a big ball of so much tangled string. Like I said, a romantic.

The what never seemed to matter so much as the why, the how.

I can’t help but feel that if that 13-year-old Cassi could see me now, she would be massively disappointed.

The current version of myself is bored senseless, and feels the dull monotony of her daily existence gnawing like termites. This version of me stares wistfully at phone booths as she passes them, hoping they will ring, hoping for some kind of adventure that will pull her out of the seemingly endless tedium and give her something to think about, something to write about.

The 13-year-old me was determined to learn, to find, to discover, to create. All I do is work and wait. She was assertive. I am passive. Far too passive. I know I’m too passive. I want to live up to the expectations of my past self. Disappointing her is just… unacceptable.

All this leads me to my point; I need to quit my job and start living my life.