By: Kimberly Baker

When you slept with the window shades open so the sunlight would come pouring into the room early in the morning, like water filling up a bathtub—you were young. When your wish was to wake up with the dawn and fall asleep way after the dark engulfed the skies and stars were scattered like sequence—there was outdoors.

Leave your house bare foot running into the open grass fields of your back yard which grows smaller by the year, or so it seems. Running around free, like how you see those pretty wild horses that run over the emerald hills that come from a picture bow in the living room. Spending the days pretending you’re something you’re not. Like a wild lioness climbing trees and hunting her prey. Or a monkey looking for bugs to eat that dwell in the dark under the rocks.

Hugging your knees as long brown hair falls in your face like a waterfall. Using all your strength to push over a rock that seems very large, but over the years, it grows no bigger than a football. Look and search for things that crawl. Hold beetles and cradle worms. Imaging you’re something you’re not till one day you grow up… and almost miss it.