The Child I Refuse to Leave Behind

Don’t let time tamper.

The first time I realized adults were just children pretending, I was nine years old, sitting cross-legged on the cold tile of our living room floor, watching my mother laugh so hard she had to wipe her eyes with the edge of her wrapper. It wasn’t the small, measured laughter I was used to—the kind that came with a shake of the head and a tired, you children will not kill me today. No, this was different. This was laughter that cracked something open, that took up space, that made her forget, if only for a moment, that she had foodstuff to worry about and a household to run.

And in that moment, she didn’t look like a mother. She didn’t look like someone who knew how to ration meat so it lasted the week or haggle with market women until the price of rice bent to her will. She looked young. Unburdened.

That was the first time I thought, maybe you don’t actually grow up. Maybe you just get better at pretending.

That thought has never left me.

Even now, I watch older people and wonder—do they truly feel like adults, or are they just committed to the bit? When they sit in traffic, gripping the steering wheel with that faraway look in their eyes, when they shake their heads at the news and say things like this country will frustrate somebody, do they really believe they are as old as they are? Or are they just waiting for someone to pull them aside and whisper, hey, we know you’re faking it too?

And they keep waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder and tell them they’re free to run outside and play. That it was never that serious. That they never had to leave that part of themselves behind.

I don’t think I was ever a child in the way people talk about childhood—wild, free, untethered. I was a child in the sense that I was small and had no money, but my mind has always felt like an old house, filled with rooms I had no business entering yet. While other children ran under the sun until their skins smelled of sweat and dust, I sat alone with my thoughts, wondering about things too big for my little hands to hold.

But even then, my soul was still becoming. It stretched, it shifted, it swayed with the current of time.

And then, one day, it stopped.

I think I was seventeen. That was the last time I remember feeling like I was changing—like something inside me was growing towards the light. After that, it was as if my body kept aging, my responsibilities increased, but my soul remained frozen in place. The same thoughts, the same fears, the same emotional responses, just rearranged in different patterns.

I wonder if other people feel this way too. If at thirty, forty, fifty, they still feel like teenagers wearing masks. If they, too, have to remind themselves to act their age, to respond correctly when people talk about investments and long-term goals. Or if, somewhere between twenty-five and forty, something clicks and you actually become an adult.

Or maybe it never happens.

People talk about maturity like it’s inevitable, like if you go through enough life, enough pain, enough responsibility, it will settle into your bones. But I have seen people who have been through the worst and still hold onto softness like a secret they refuse to give up. And I have seen people who have barely lived, yet walk around hardened, as if they have already decided the world is something to endure, not to experience.

So what is it, then? What makes a soul old? Is it pain? Is it wisdom? Is it learning to swallow words because you know speaking will change nothing?

I think my soul is still young because it refuses to be anything else. I have been hurt. I have lost people. I have made mistakes so embarrassing they make me want to shrink into myself. But despite it all, I still believe in things that should have been beaten out of me by now.

I still believe people can change.

I still believe good things happen for no reason at all.

I still believe that life is not just about surviving it.

And that is the thing, isn’t it? The world tries so hard to convince us that we have to harden, that we have to shed our wonder, our softness, our dreams, in order to be real adults. But I do not want that. I do not want to reach a point where I stop believing in kindness, in possibility, in the idea that love—real, unselfish, transformative love—can change a person.

I do not want to become one of those people who think vulnerability is a weakness.

So I still stop to watch the way sunlight moves through leaves. I still listen to music in a way that makes my chest ache. Sometimes, when it rains, I let it touch my face just to remember what it felt like to be five years old—playing in the rain in Karu, believing the world existed solely for my wonder.

But life has tried. Oh, it has tried to make me forget.

Some people do not have the luxury of keeping their souls young. Some people have to grow up at ten, learning how to carry burdens that were never meant to be theirs. Some people are forced to make peace with disappointment too early. Some people unlearn joy because life teaches them that hope is foolish.

I think my soul is still young because it still hopes. Because it does not know how to give up. Because no matter how much the world tries to tell me otherwise, I still believe that being a person—an actual, living, breathing person—is about more than bills and deadlines and practical choices.

Some people wear their age like a heavy coat, wrapped tightly around them, letting it weigh them down. But I think there is another way. I think you can let your age be something you carry lightly, something that sits on your skin rather than seeps into your bones. I think you can hold onto the parts of yourself that time has not touched—the parts that still want to run in the rain, that still believe in magic, that still find comfort in a song you loved at thirteen.

Because the truth is, you do not have to let go of those parts of yourself.

You do not have to trade them in for something duller, something more “realistic.”

You do not have to let yourself become old in the way the world expects.

Not yet.

Not ever.

I refuse to let my soul age before its time.

And if I ever start to—if I ever catch myself becoming a version of me that feels less like me—I hope I fight my way back. I hope I claw my way out of whatever mold the world tries to put me in.

Because I do not want to be someone who forgets.

I do not want to be someone who lets go of who they are just because it is easier.

So I will hold onto my soul.

Despite the years.

Despite the world’s insistence.

Despite, despite, despite.