The end…kinda

I just finished reading my book. I’ve read it about a million times, but this was the first time I read through it, knowing there wasn’t much I could do to change it. I’ve had four years of reading this book, each sentence temporary in my mind…and now they aren’t. Now, these sentences are staying, the story indelible.
After all this time, I really am happy where the book ended up. I try to stop myself from cringing at the thought of the first manuscript I wrote of Above. I try to give myself credit that at least I wrote it, but still it’s hard not to be hard on your self. It’s amazing what it has become since then. In a lot of ways I feel like the book has grown with me, blossomed into something entirely different. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you much about the girl who had first written this. I remember her slightly, the important things having never changed, but I don’t really know who I was when I first wrote this. I was living in New Jersey, before I moved to California, before the world looked different.
I realized something the other night. No matter what happens with this book…if it falls painfully into the never read category or flourishes into something else, I will always have it with me. I think it’s pretty cool that I’ll be able to read it over when I’m thirty and catch some glimpse into my sixteen-year-old self, find the seventeen-year-old missing her mom across the country, or the eighteen or nineteen-year-old still unsure but a little bit older. I’ll have my own personal time capsule. Because although Above is a story and most of the things are made up, there are pieces of me that I left behind, a journal of some kind. It can be this fossil I dig up over and over again, never quite satisfied, but never disappointed either.