“‘Good weather!’ he exclaimed, ‘isn’t it? Makes me feel about ten.

 I mean it makes me feel as

 I should have felt when I was ten.’” 

From The Beautiful and Damned, by Scott Fitzgerald. 

        Eleven. It was an age that technology has erased. All the photos I took at eleven on my blue Fujifilm camera are on SD cards that are too old to work in 2019 computers. The computers that we backed our SD cards on are old in the the garage or don’t turn on anymore. It’s as if I was never eleven, except for knowing that age twenty-two comes after eleven years are doubled (old woman soon?). There isn’t concrete evidence to prove that I existed at that age, though. Just fragments of memories floating around in my head like a dense seven-thirty am fog on a mountain. There may not even be a doctor’s records from that year because my family may not have had insurance, so again, no evidence. It might be the first year I wore glasses, but even then, we did a special sort of off-the-record eye appointments--the only kind we could afford--and the records from that would have been minimal if existent.

     My first eyes glasses were pink used wire-rim round glasses. They looked like my first reading glasses that came with a hot-dog case. Blush pink, flesh-colored. Cold metal. It took me a while to wear them. The bob-and-bangs gentle, firm, middle-aged optometrist said first glasses shouldn’t be plastic, too obvious. She didn’t even wear plastic glasses. I was shocked at the things I could see with glasses, but also at how imperfect I was with them. People are always more attractive when they’re blurry, especially the pre-teen me with long, stringy hippie hair that I used to cover my face. The optometrist thought I had scoliosis because my body was uneven; my dad said it was bad posture I’d developed from having hair covering my eyes. But I don’t think this happened at eleven--twelve at the earliest, but likely thirteen. Thirteen was a memorable year. People said I looked too old from developing early. My body grew big. Boys stared at me in the store and my mom panicked. I was miserable at twelve, too, for the same reasons. But was I unhappy at eleven?  

      There are many trademark moments that took my childhood away from me. Some are clearer in my teenage years, but thinking back, so many happened at eleven. It may have been the age--or was it ten, almost eleven, or nine--that I started my first blood, got spanked with a tall wooden or metal spoon for possibly the last time in the ritualistic pants-down way (for not talking at the table--AKA “sulking.” Quite an embarrassing and unexpected moment), and bought a doll that I had saved up for and realized I didn’t want. All these things make me sad as I write them. But was eleven really a sad age? 

       Apart from these vague milestone moments, I can’t really remember what happened at eleven and what didn’t. I can tell you about the friends I had at eleven. That may have been the year I was allowed to leave Mom’s Sunday School class and learn the shorter catechism with a geeky boy and a girl two-and-a-half years older than me. Or, maybe that was when I was nine and eleven was the year I made a public profession. I think that may have been 2011 though and not age eleven, but I am unsure. 

       My “best friend forever” was not my friend forever, but we were close for seven whole years. That’s supposed to be the friends-forever mark, according to several statistics. If you’re friends with someone for seven years, you’ll probably last for life. They were counting junior high girls. Still, I wonder about her and miss her. She was so pretty, and she had such an attitude. Her worldly obsessions (including a heavy crush on James Dean!) made me admire her. She wore spaghetti strap dresses--sometimes without a sweater over them. She was heavyset, but not always in a “fat” way, but a balanced way. It must be a genetic thing in my blood to always judge people’s weights. I remember certain memories of my family commenting on other’s fluctuating weights, and my own was always included in the mix. Maybe that’s why I don’t eat and then binge other times! But here I go, blaming others for my sins. Forgive me, I’m thinking like an eleven-year-old, blaming everyone but me for my problems. But I did feel heavy at eleven. Was that a 103 lbs year? My brothers would laugh and try to get me to stand on the scale. They’d make fun of my pudgy legs. You’re supposed to forget these things, but even at eleven, I was a sensitive creature. Who wants a body anyway? 

       Was that the year that it snowed and I pretended to have a TV show on my camera? My hair was soft and long and still curly then, and I am vain now, still. Did we have piano lessons then? Was that the year that Susanna had her first recital and I wrote a poem about an elephant to accompany her piece? We were never an emotionally stable family per se, but memories like these make me long for the emotional instability we used to have in comparison to the kind we have now. You know, it’s like at eleven there is promise. Being a teenager sounds exciting! Growing up sounds exciting! You’re learning things; you’re doing new things; you’re dreaming freely. You haven’t realized yet that things often get worse when you get older. People stop trying to push you to learn things. Fewer people care about what you do. There’s not the excitement about life that you have a child when living life means something different than it does when you’re full-grown. And you think at eleven that things might could change, but it’s when you’re older that you realize that they don’t or never did. Still, when things are happening quickly at a young age, none of the bad stuff seems set in stone. There’s so much more hope. 

      There is a chance that, because tonight is a sad night, as many nights, I might have a tendency to complain about others in this rant. About how I wasn’t allowed much privacy or to have sleepovers at eleven or was in the house most of the time, or whatever. There’s always good and bad to every story. But I don’t want to cloud eleven forever. Even if I wasn’t a bubbly eleven-year-old all the time, I sometimes was. And so let me stop whining like a child and focus on the good events. They’re harder to remember, maybe because they’re worth more--they’re not free, cheap bad memories. You have to dig for them in the bad stuff and search for the gold. 

      At eleven, I was probably writing fairy tales. About literal fairies named after virtues, something my close friend was obsessed with. There was a princess named Princess Faith. She lived in a village, but she fell in love with a working-class boy. Always typed new versions of that on a typewriter! Never really knew if I finished many! The typewriter I had then was likely a blue one. It wasn’t electric like my second one. Actually, my second beige one with an LED screen was fancy! I was so impressed by it. Sometimes, just for birthdays and Christmas, all I’d ask for would be a ream of copy paper. It was the best gift in the world! I’d fold all the pages carefully like a magazine and fill them up to create a book. Typing made everything so official. I wanted to be published so badly. How close it was to actual print, on a typewriter!

     The setup, at eleven, was probably downstairs in my den. Right next to where the piano is now (it used to be against the opposing wall!). I’d type for hours. Sometimes I’d cheat on math (my heart is still heavy from that) so that I could go and write. Musicals about orphans inspired by Annie (how my heart loved that movie! My Mom wouldn’t let us watch it but once because it was “inappropriate,” but I grinned the entire film!), and about pirates (a series!!). There was a lot of obsession with pirates, probably from Treasure Island. There was something so warm about the main pirate in Treasure Island. I felt paternal vibes from him. He made me excited about living, about going off to sea. I loved the feeling that gave me. Apparently, at ten I read Ivanhoe, the full book. I was in love with Sir Brian. You’d think with my environment that my stories would be cleaner than they were. They really weren’t. In many ways, I don’t think that the stories I was writing I realized were really inappropriate to the extent that I do know now. But I won’t go into those. Those may have been thrown away by me when I was older, but they’re likely in a box somewhere, undated, like almost everything. 

       Eleven may have been the age of intentional, nightly lucid dreaming. That didn’t start with a good dream exactly. It too was very inappropriate, though not in a way you might expect. I internalized and romanticized a lot of the frustrating, traumatic parts of the day and turned them into fantastical events in dreams that I could control as another character in another world. My eleven-year-old dream self was like a female Johnny Depp. I grew so fast that I thought I would be tall, dark, and lean. She had hair to her shoulders, a thin face with high cheekbones, dark, dark, eyes. 

      My hair got compliments at eleven. Come to think, that was probably the age Mom cut it to my shoulders. Andrew and I would make movies on our cameras at eleven, and we had these T-shirts from a high school in Anniston that we wore from a friend’s garage sale hunt. Most of our clothes came from her garage store finds. Most of the stuff we were allowed to keep was the t-shirts. There were so many crisp white ones that had the Anniston bulldogs logo on them. Listen to my vanity! But really, it might also have been the age of the very-bad-haircut (that may have been 14). Bangs, a bob, and glasses. I couldn’t hide anymore. The whole family had a whack at my hair then, it seemed. I was embarrassed. But it also may have been the age of that fantastic long pixie cut that I begged my mom for (it was mostly an accident, her cutting it!) and that my dad liked and Jonathan said was too short for a girl. That was before glasses.

      So many stories. So many crafts. I hate my untidiness, my hoarding, my clutter. Just sitting here typing this and looking around. Have I thrown anything away since I was eleven? So many toys still. So many books and papers and clothes (not much growing since eleven!). I might still have the denim jumpers with the Noah’s Ark patches on them like I wore when I was eleven. Wore a new one that day a pastor was ordained in the church. I wanted (channeling William Blake’s greedy “I WANT! I WANT” engraving showing a being reaching for the stars) “form-fitting clothes” as my friend and I dreamed about, with to-the-knee cuts and sashes and roses. But a new dress was a new dress. Even if we sometimes wore handmade pinafores and denim dresses. They were made with love and I felt beautiful in them because they were new. 

     You might not think it, but I was into American Girl then. One particularly worldly thing I did was collect magazines that came in the mail--Walmart, BNH (?) and American Girl, specifically. Listen, I’d dream for hours. That consumerism bothers me now. But I’d make dream Christmas lists all throughout the year. I’d fantasize about how to budget getting gifts for me and everyone for a million dollars. A plate set for my pastor’s wife. A new camera for mom, with some clothes and maybe an art set and a laptop--probably a Macbook like she always wanted. Was there a way I could get Dad a new car and still have leftovers from the million? Well, not everyone’s amounts had to be equal. And then there was that amount that would go to the government. I’d get Susanna a whole new outfit too, and some laptops, like the other girls had. Oh, there was this other fantasy I had about “reality.” I’d always wanted another sibling. Would pray for it all the time. Then, I found out about fostering and adoption from some books I was reading and dreamed that my parents would adopt at least seven more kids, probably more. I’d have a good new brother, Susanna and I would have sisters. I dreamed of all the fun we would have together. It feels as if they’d existed, this fictional family. We would grow up, the four of us with these other older siblings, best friends for life, best friends in the world. We would accomplish things together. We would have such good friends and wear beautiful North Face jackets. And we would take care of an adopted baby, too. 

      I don’t think 11 was the all-camo-and-gray-boy’s-clothes-only-wore-one-outfit days. I may have gotten a maroon pair of workout pants that always swished. They made me feel slim and I wore them all the time. I wasn’t allowed to wear shorts out in public past eleven, I don’t think. 

     There were the Sam Stories. By eleven, the Sam Stories were probably existant. He was the richest boy in the world who was allowed to do anything he wanted! I had all his voices down, loved the improv acting and storytelling. It was  a big part of my brothers’ and my lives (and probably my sister, too, her heard it!), but it was so private. I’d never let my friend know about it the voices and dances of the talking monkeys. 

      I had three 18’ dolls. They meant a lot to me because they were beautiful. My thirteenth birthday was a more memorable year. Everything was green, and there were more gifts that I remember getting. A grenen Walmart fan, a green