this is the story of a girl

today i went to a meeting in the parish hall of my old grade school. the meeting was a training for substitute teaching at that very school, which is strange and interesting and circular in its own way. but what struck me most about tonight, when i walked into that room, is how utterly unchanged it looked - down to the same old tiles, the same auditorium stage, the same round tables with the faces scratched from age and use. i sat down at one of the tables (thankfully, they had enough common sense to get new chairs after ten years) and could almost see myself as a shy ten-year-old, sitting across the table staring at what i would become.

and i stared across that room and i saw as i had in all its different incarnations: dark and strobelighted for our seventh and eighth grade dances; stark and full of white robed kids before our confirmation and graduation ceremonies; loud and crowded as it always was during our lunch hour; hushed and spotlit for every annual talent show. i grew up in that room and i never even noticed until i came back, unwittingly, ten years later.

at the end of the training i ducked into the bathroom to see if it, too, had remained the same. sure enough, it was as though i had stepped into 2001 - the same off-white tiles, the same off-white stalls, the same single sink and the same blue ribbom wallpaper border. i stood in front of the mirror and brushed the hair out of my face and realized that although i am now twenty-three and so different than i how used to be, there i was: standing in the same place and doing the exact same thing as my eighth-grade self. there were the same eyes peering out at me; they hadn't changed a bit (and you know what they say about the eyes). so there i was, completely different and yet still, somehow, the same. and in that moment i realized the biggest difference between me, today, and the girl who looked in that mirror all those years ago: as hard as she tried, she could never, ever like what she saw. the girl looking in the mirror today sees it all for what it is and what it has been (beauty and flaws alike) - but unlike the girl from long ago, this one wouldn't change a thing.