I’m heading off to college in three days, and I feel about three years old. Looking back on my senior year of high school, I have come to realize that I went through a serious growing-up crisis. Every week I would go to the town library and take out about… fourteen children’s books. After a month I could have sworn that the librarians assumed I had a kindergarten-aged child, or that I was an extremely dedicated babysitter, or that I was nuts. Either way, I would read two books before bed each night. I would look around my room and see it through each renovation; the two green walls sponge-painted by my mother, my first “big girl” bed, the rocking chair, the fish mobile from Point Pleasant beach.

I searched desperately for all the things that could make me little again. Finding memories in old photographs and VHS tapes, I recreated life through bulky sweaters and my mom’s high school rings. My mother fell back into the habit of reading to me before bed, both of us trying to turn back the time that was passing all too quickly. And that’s scary, the realization that in a few months, weeks, days you’ll be packing up your whole life and moving to a new city with new people who have no clue that your favorite color is yellow or that in sixth grade you saved all your babysitting money for a sock monkey named BoBo or that you never learned to make friendship bracelets or that you just want to love, everything. And it’s hard to love everything, especially when everything is new and everyone is skeptical, and trying to claw their way into the coolest group of friends or the best seat in class. It’s all a big race and the dirt starts to build up inside of us, not just under our fingernails.

I’m sure that college libraries will be full of bigger books with smaller text and less pictures. They may also have lovely things to say, but it isn’t the same. I must admit, however, that there is one major parallel; as children we look at all things in the present with wonder, and now we look at our futures with wonder as well. And that ability, that trait, that gift of looking at the world through the eyes of a child is really the key – because in a big and bustling city it is easy to get stuck somewhere in the middle, until we remember that we were once, and are still, little.