16 years

A couple of weekends ago I wore this dress.  The one other time I wore it? Sixteen years before.  I've saved all the dresses I've worn to school dances and proms.  This one was from a Valentine dance.

I needed something for a party where women were supposed to wear red, and since it was outside and hot this was all I could think of.  I had to do a side by side picture.  I'm posting and writing about this not for the reasons you might think.  Not to tell you to look how it still fits, that's not interesting.  By the time I was about 14 or 15 is when my body pretty much figured out where it wanted to be in terms of height and weight.  I have only strayed (both below and above) under circumstances that weren't natural for me.  Like recovering from a surgery (really skinny) and first moving to NYC where I drank and ate too much for awhile (the plumpest I've been).  My body knows and fights for where it wants to be.

So now that that's out of the way, what I couldn't get over was the person in the dress.  That's what was interesting to me.  What she's gone through in the nearly two decades since she last wore this very same thing!

Who she was before, and who she is now.

I couldn't believe the path that little girl had yet to go down when she went to her Valentine dance, what she would experience over the next sixteen years of her life.

And I wanted to try to write it.



Prom dates and roller skates
First kisses and first heartbreaks
Shorter hair and leading roles
Brand new friends and theatre goals
Platform shoes, a first job at the mall
Egging houses with friends and taking the fall
Coming of age with the first time
Getting sick from mixing liquor with wine
Holding a school office, graduation day
My second visit to New York City and wanting to stay
Westminster College for a year,
Meeting a new best friend to this day I hold dear
Moving across the country at nineteen years old
My world upside down with how New York unfolds
Meeting the boy of my dreams my first day there
Feeling I'd die when two years later he didn't care
Another graduation and in our final play the lead
Moving home when my family was my need
One chapter began when this one was past
Jumping into the wrong relationship and engaged too fast
Back to New York and this time with him
Breaking up and back home to do a new play on a whim
This is the part where life truly starts for me
Growing into the adult I was always meant to be
A new man in the picture, not at all like the rest
He would become my husband, he would be the best
A taste of what fame feels like, at last
YouTube, TV, news, press, runways, happening so fast
The goal of an equity card would at last come true
My first dog (a bird a cat and a frog) would live in my home, too
Many people many plays all add up the story of me
Then would come the summer of 2012, and from new eyes I'd forever see
The first funeral and loss of someone dear
His leaving taught me everything and what's precious I now keep near.
Brand new plans and the biggest chapters still ahead
To the little girl in the red dress, all this I would have said.


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