Birthdays

Today is my last day of being a teenager.

Almost every year I cry on my birthday. Not because I feel like I am getting old, or I am afraid of change, but because I always look back on the things I have done or the person I once was and realize that I can never go back. I know it sounds absolutely petty and childish, but I have always hated losing the "old me." I am do not fear change, in fact I embrace it. But I know that I can never be the 13 year old girl, awkward, tall and friendless, or the 15 year old girl busy with music and church, always wrongly judging her older sister and being a listener for her mom. I also can never go back to the confident 17 year old that knows exactly what she wants out of life and is on the path to achieve it. I know that it is simply part of life to move on and to leave things behind, yet, I wish I could instead move on and take it all with me.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

By Robert Frost