To the girl

I've almost forgotten you, the girl who filled up notebooks with stories modelled after Beverly Cleary's Ramona books, who illustrated the chapters with pencil drawings. You would write poems about whales and monkeys and magic mirrors, forcing the lines to rhyme with comical effect, for poetry that didn't rhyme wasn't really poetry, right?

As I wandered the white streets of Inuvik early this morning, the starkness ironically brought out the most vivid of colours in my mind. I remembered rich green fields dotted with yellow buttercups and daisies. That was when you appeared, girl who sat for hours, making daisy-chains with friends, feeling the moist lushness of earth and grass between your toes.

What has happened to you? What has time done to you? You have found new ways to articulate the feelings inside you, new ways to voice the wonder you see all around you. But, would you allow for the feelings that have no words to flourish still? Would you stop amid a field and pick daisies? Would you draw up a frenzy of stick figures without a self-conscious ache? Would you?

Girl who lies dormant within me, who was me, who may still be me, why is it that your childish poetry will always seem more poetic than the lines that I write now?