An eight-year-old me is running, stumbling, tripping through the six inch snow that covers the ground outside her house. She is laughing with the freeness that only young children have, a neon-coated whirlwind in the dead of winter.

I look at her face; so familiar, yet so foreign to me. She doesn’t have any makeup on, but she’s luminous anyway. So free of worry. So naive. This child, this ten-years-ago me, is everything I have lost.

The cold breeze of reality plays with my hair. Its chill sends me spinning forward, flying towards a ‘now’ that I don’t want to acknowledge.

And this beautiful, eight-year-old me is fading away, melting like a snowflake in the sun.