On 10 years of a missing childhood.

I still have yet to understand the complex intertwining depths of life and love and friendship. How one person can have so much soul. How one moment can bring such a significant impact on one heart.

To be flooded by a rush of memory and an explosion of heartbeat is something only the people involved could understand. Rarely does a person know what it's like to be close to someone outside of family who you have known your entire, entire life. And what it means to be back at that very place where it all started. The adventure, the laughter, and the tears.

In 2003 I thought my childhood was over.  Really, the life I knew truly was. Being forced into a new world, new place, new relationships. It shaped me into the person and writer I am today, but never once have I stopped looking back and wondering what would've happened to the end of my childhood if life hadn't taken me to such a different path than I had planned for myself.


But yet here I am, back to 31st Street with the same friends I grew up with and all I can do is shake my head and smile.

The truest of true.

There are just those people. Those certain special people that affect you in such a way that you KNOW, no matter what you do or say, you will never be able to convey to them exactly what they mean to you. 

For me, the Lemons and the Arhnolds are those people. 

They have a part of my heart that nobody will ever be able to have. They have touched a part of my soul that nobody will ever be able to touch. It's because they know me. They love me. And there is not a single memory I have from growing up that doesn't have them in it. 

They were and still are, in every way, my family from another family. Our neighborhood is my home. 

I was blessed with the truest of childhoods. And now as an adult, I am blessed with the truest of friends. 

❤