Never Grow Up: A Letter to Four Year Old Me

Now Playing: Never Grow Up by Taylor Swift (your little hand's wrapped around my finger and it's so quiet in the world tonight)

Dearest Four,

I really wish you'd stop chucking tantrums every time your sister goes to school (which is EVERY DAY, so that's a LOT OF TANTRUMS) and you don't. It's really. Not. That. Great. I would know.

Other than that, at four, you're sweet, and life's sweet. You still eat more nutella than is humanly possible. At four you're much like you are at sixteen, actually, only without the PMS and the inexplicable attraction to inexplicable boys. Your biggest complaint in life is that Daddy's car smells funny, so methinks you've got it pretty good. You're over your harry highpants stage and everything is pretty and frilly and flowery - you wear white stockings with pink flowers on them and socks with scratchy lace trim like a spinster grandmother. And you've got a big thing for denim, too, and I'm not quite sure why. You go batshit over anything Hello Kitty and anything purple makes you hyperventilate with excitement because it's your FAVOURITE COLOUR OF ALL TIME. You're fluent in Korean but you lose it pretty fast once 할아버지 leaves. When you're sixteen you'll be itching to relearn it, and not just because you're trying to trick foreign relatives into getting you things you can't reach.

Dearest Four, you're going to Singapore and you're going to turn five there and you're super duper trooper excited. You think it's the first time but you've actually been there a million times since you were a teeny tiny baby (actually, you're still pretty teeny tiny - are you 3' yet?). You stood by the window in Grandma's apartment in your nightgown and wet hair in the middle of the night, just staring and wondering how the world got so big. It gets bigger, dearest Four. And scarier. But much, much more beautiful.

I love your big elephant ears. I love how your favourite words are 'why' and 'what' and 'how', not 'don't care'. I love your big gummy grin and the cheeky glint in your eyes. Things get scary from here on in, dearest Four. I wish I could prepare you but there's no way to tell a four year old how to deal with hospital and pain and disorientation and scars. But you pull through, dearest Four, you always do. 'Giving up' and 'can't do this' don't exist in your gung-ho vocabulary. You're a daydreamer and a chatterbox, dearest Four, and hold on to that. It's what makes you strong, stronger than I am.

Love,
Nearly Seventeen