By Camila Bonilla

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A personal essay about change.

Does something ever stop existing in your mind once you stop talking about it? Could it stop eventually? Would the bundle of neural fragments eventually stop stringing themselves along and wither away? 

A budding feeling in the heart. Something was coming. 

Spring made me sneeze for the first time ever. I had never been shaken by the changing seasons, but yet, here it was. I had thought myself to be like those sturdy trees in the park across my home. Rooted and unchanging. I bristled in the warming wind. Would I come down? I remember when that grounded oak came smackdown in the middle of the trail. I remember thinking about me existing after it had fallen, after the words had been said. Who was there? 

Walking through the forest, as a child, I could never imagine the trees being anywhere else from where they were, in the ground. I grew up in the same apartment for most of my life. I had always shared a room, but somewhere in my mind, I remember being alone. I remember an empty room, and a small wooden house, then more furniture and noise. Everything had changed. One day the ceiling had crumbled in between us, dust and plaster piled on the floor, just before we crossed each other in the hallway. 

Yesterday, I sat in bed. The fresh scent of sandalwood incense lingered in my room from the day before that one. I shuffled the yellow cards then wrote down my findings in my gray journal. It was the first time I had done so. I opened the pages to find an entry from a couple of weeks ago. I said I would document my thoughts all the way until I went to college. I didn’t. I felt something changing but I couldn’t bother to write it. Could neural fragments, the pieces of it crumbling be transferred onto paper? It was a good day. I brought the tuning of my guitar a half step down, then tried to learn 1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins. I felt change on the horizon.