Eleven

One of my favorite short stories is “Eleven,” by Sandra Cisneros. If you haven’t read it, you really need to. It perfectly personifies how I feel about growing up. The story is written from the perspective of a girl named Rachel on her eleventh birthday, and how she wakes up feeling no different. Rachel explains that even though she’s eleven, she stills feels one, and two, and three, and four, and all the ages leading up to that. She says all of her ages rattle around inside of her, “like pennies in a tin Band-Aid.” She has days when she feels three, and wants to crawl in her mother’s lap and cry. Days when she feels ten and wants to do things her own way. In essence, Rachel hits on the universal truth that we never really lose an age, we just add a new one to our collection. Well today I felt eleven. And that eleven year old inside of me needed some attention. My roommates and I wandered into the toy aisle of Wal-Mart the other day, and shamelessly bought four Nerf guns on a whim. Before we knew it, all the lights in our apartment had been turned off, all our furniture rearranged into bunkers, and we spent an entire hour shooting each other with foam darts. And it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. I don’t care how foolish I looked… the eight year old inside of me needed it too much to care. So if you haven’t shot a Nerf gun in a decade or so… do your eleven year old a favor, and give it a try.