It's Time to Grow Up

I wasn’t very old when I realized it was time for me to grow up. When I was a child, my best friend in the entire world was Daisy. Her and I would do everything together.  She came over to my house but I had never been to hers. She went to school with me everyday and we sat beside each other in class, we were inseparable. Everywhere I went Daisy would come with me. She was caring, loving and was always there for me, a shoulder to cry on, my best friend.

I loved being a kid. I loved that I didn’t have to worry about all the things older people had to stress about. Homework, rush hour, getting an oil change, paying your taxes. To me that all seemed so far away. There are no worries when you're a child you get to play all day, sleep whenever you like, and you never got any homework. Being a kid was like a dream. A reality that now seems so far away from the life I’m living now. Yet when I was younger I still always wanted to grow up, I wanted to see what it was like having responsibilities.

I splashed around in the water with Daisy standing beside me, we had gone to the beach on a warm summer day. The sun was shining in the sky, music was playing nearby, people eating ice cream and building sand castles. Some of my best memories are from the beach. I’ve always loved the feeling of the warm sun on my skin. I love the feeling of sand in my toes, how when you dig your feet deeper into the sand they start to feel cold. The beach always seemed to calm me, relax me and make me feel safe.

My sister Charlotte and I had be building an amazing sandcastle together. We had shells all over it and we had built a moat surrounding the castle. My sister and I had always had such a great relationship. We would fight here and there but overall we were best buddies, stuck together like glue. After we finished our castle we went into the water to wash off all the sand, I looked around but didn’t see Daisy anywhere. Then I remembered she wasn’t with us either when we built the castle.

Daisy was gone for pretty much the rest of the day but I wasn’t too worried about it because she had been leaving all of a sudden recently, one minute she was there, another minute she was gone. I only really started to get worried when we were about to leave and she still didn’t come back. She never came back.

Looking back on this day I can still remember the feelings I had. I had felt like there was something deep down in my stomach making it uneasy, like somebody was twisting and turning my small intestine. It killed me to think that I had lost her, that it was my responsibility and she was gone because of me.

Being a kid I always wanted to grow up. I wanted to be older and get to drive a car, get to stay out as late as I wanted and have a job. But sometimes I thought to myself that I wasn’t ready for that.  Daisy leaving flipped a switch in my mind later that day that made me realize that growing up isn’t a bad thing. Looking back on my childhood and realizing that Daisy was only a figment of my imagination, I realized that her disappearance is my mind telling me it is time to grow up. My heart would tell me that Daisy was going to be around forever, yet my mind was telling me what was right. Daisy wasn’t real. She may have been a big part of my life but it was time for me to break out of my shell. It was time for me to grow up.