I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

It’s hard to look back and see us as we were, rather than who we would become, hard not to see text bubbles floating above our heads: “Murdered Girl” and “Opera Star!” and “Sad Drunk.”

We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.

I thought of a friend in LA who’d said recently, of her own daughter, “It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what’s coming. Seventh grade’s gonna hit like a wall. It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter.” But what was the alternative? Starving the pig?

I had to accept that people fundamentally slide past each other in this world.

Everything green is something that’s survived.