Eleven - Sandra Cisneros (Fragment)

    What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.

     Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

    Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.

     You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don’t feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve. That’s the way it is.

Good Bones - Maggie Smith

"Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. 

The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, 

though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. 

Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one
who would break you, though I keep this from my children.

I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shit hole,
chirps on about good bones: 

This place could be beautiful, right? 

You could make this place beautiful."