Luke starts sixth grade in one week. Maybe it's different for boys, and easier somehow because they don't mature as quickly as girls, but I found almost all of middle school to be hellish. I was too young to do anything on my own like go to the Quick Mart, and too old to play with stuffed animals and dolls. Plus, I was losing that ability to forget myself in games I made up. Or maybe that happened in seventh grade. I do remember this distinct feeling of loss--losing the ability to be able to make up pretend stories, like when kids play house or imagine they are super heroes. When you're little and making stuff up, there's a part of you that believes it's real--you really are Wonder Woman or Batgirl or slaying dragons or running away from monsters--it's possible to forget that you're a human girl and imagine that you are more than that and the world has mystical things like dragons and if you concentrate hard enough, you might be able to fly or time travel. When you're younger, you can still capture that feeling, or maybe it's more about having the ability to not be self-conscious. Because somewhere around age 11 or 12, those feelings evaporate and you are concious of every single thing about yourself, your family, the car your mom drives, the way your legs are moving as you walk, your stomach rumbling in the middle of class, how nerdy it is to bring a bagged lunch and how your mom still writes your name on the front even though you've asked her not to--all of these things that didn't matter, such as how your arms hang at your sides, become painfully obvious and horrible.
Even the name of where you're going is bad. You are entering "middle school." It's like "middle age," this nebulous existence where you're neither young nor old, you're just in between and stuck. For years.
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