My Apology/On Growing Up

by Anna Dennis ‘23

I told him it was because he was atheist. Or Hindu. Or agnostic. Or whatever belief system suited my selfish desire to expel him from my life. It’s a classic—Sorry, our religious beliefs are just too different! I think we just have different priorities!

Really, I cut our ties because Hollywood force-fed me romances that rarely held up to real life. The week I told him let’s try this, let’s make it work, let’s try talking, I left my planner in my desk in 6th period English. The planner that held my hopes and dreams, college decision passwords, every TV show I had ever watched, every song that sung to my existence. Lived in a bounded codex that was in the hands of God knows who. I had signed away my being into the hands of someone I didn’t know—or at least, that’s what it felt like when I was 17. But it also felt...exhilarating, top-of-the-hill-on-a-rollercoaster, and somehow divinely ordained. Who was the mysterious 17-year-old enrobed in highlighter yellow gym shorts and matching Nikes who would read the sacred pages of my high school planner? What would he think of the version of myself that lived between the pages, and what position would he be sleeping in when he woke up one day and realized he unknowingly had fallen in love with a girl he didn’t know? I lied to a boy for the sake of a story that never happened.

I think about such high school blunders as I take college classes in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by every memory I would choose to forget if given the choice. Why was I thinking about him? The way I dropped him for the mere possibility of a Hollywood romance theatrical. Being in your childhood bedroom, the room in which you learned the quadratic formula and cried over your first middle school heartbreak, tends to unearth memories. When he asked me out, his voice cracked. He was still growing, and I decided to stunt it. I can be so cruel in pursuit of what I think is good for me. What I think will push me onwards and upwards.

Yet, here I sit, my Harry Potter posters from fifth grade still peeking into the camera of my Zoom calls. Fifth-grade me is never far behind and 17-year-old me is even closer. I still add my selections to the family grocery shopping list, and my mom still yells at me when I don't take the dogs outside in the morning. I am growing up, but not in the stiletto-wearing businesswoman way I imagined. Instead, growing up looks a lot more like volunteering to cut vegetables for dinner and willingly cleaning out my dresser drawers because I can't bear to look at middle school t-shirts any longer. Growing up looks a lot more like an apology. An apology to my mom for wearing headphones on our drives to school when I know those moments are precious now. An apology to my sister for always yelling at her when she sang in the shower when now I know One Direction won't come out with more songs for her to sing. An apology to my dad for quitting sports so young when I know he only had so long to coach his daughter's soccer team. Growing up is an apology, and as I sit in my Zoom college classes in my childhood bedroom, I'll continue unearthing versions of myself to apologize for. But I'll start with the boy I was so cruel towards for the sake of an unrealized, Hollywood love story.