Dear Princess,
Not a day goes by that I don't remember the little things about you. Tonight I was sitting here with my cat, Marbles, who will be a year old next month, and realized you'd never even seen him. It's been that long - eleven months and eleven days - since I saw you last. That hurts my heart in a way I don't even know how to describe.
I'm working on a digital collage, when a picture comes up in my image search from the video to a Taylor Swift song. Instantly I remember how much you loved her. How you sang all the songs in the car, and had names for all of them... "The Princess One," "The Angel One"... I can still hear every note of your voice as you sat in the back seat of my car in your booster seat singing "I was... 'chanted to meet youuuuuu". I remember the time White Horse was playing, and the lyric "Stupid girl, I should've known" played, and you piped up, "Stupid girl?! That is NOT very nice!" I smile when I remember. It's one of the only times I genuinely smile anymore... when I remember the joy you brought to my life.
I know you. I know you so well that every little detail reminds me. Down to the color pink. If I see pink and purple balloons, I think how you would have wanted one. I see a frilly skirt in the store, and I comment to whomever is with me "I would have had to buy this for A." Sometimes I still find myself wandering around the girls' clothing department of stores, checking for your size in all the cutest outfits, sometimes collecting them to show whomever I'm with, and then finding myself sadly putting them back because I don't have you to dress up in them anymore.
Barbecue sauce reminds me of you. You loved barbecue sauce, you put it on everything. There's still a little cup of it on my dresser that we got at Wendy's in Dulles on our way home almost a year ago. Once, we were going through a drive thru, and for once you hadn't reminded me to get barbecue sauce (you almost always did), but I remembered and asked for it specifically. As we pulled out of the parking lot, you said "Thank you, Katie," and I was puzzled, and I glanced back at you and asked "For what?" You said "For remembering to get me barbecue sauce." And I never forgot again.
Candy dots remind me of you, because when we were in St. Augustine, we saw them at the candy store (you know, the one I spent an arm and a leg in?) and I asked you if you'd ever had them, and you said no, so we bought some. We bought so much candy that day that we never got around to eating them. They're on my dresser with the barbecue sauce - I'm not going to eat them without you.
The local swimming pool reminds me of you. How eager you were to go down the slides as soon as you were tall enough (which is NOTHING like the fearful little girl I take to the fair every year!) and how you always made me go down the blue one and you go down the orange one, because the blue one was dark inside and you didn't like it. I remember how mad you were when we went to a different pool where you weren't tall enough for the slides. That was the pool with the lazy river, in which you were always anything but lazy - doggy paddling in your little innertube so you'd go faster. I remember how when you first started talking, around age four, you called it the "swimming park", only you couldn't quite say the words, so it came out "feminny pok" and it took us two weeks to figure out what you were talking about every time we drove by!
You love dresses and jewelry and getting all fancied up "like a princess". You had a set of princess makeup that you got at your 7th birthday party that sometimes I'd wake up to find you covered in, and all your dolls and stuffed animals too. I remember the time you put makeup on the lips of all the cat knick-knacks on the shelf in your room, and I was mad... but not too mad, because it was cute. You loved silly bands and begged me to buy them for you, but then you gave them all to Noah at daycare, because more than anything else, you LOVED Noah. You still talked about Noah years after the last time you saw him. You ignored almost everyone else at your 7th birthday party to run around and wreck havoc on everything with him. But you said he wasn't your boyfriend, just your friend that was a boy. For all the dresses and jewels, you loved playing with boys. Once, my friends and I took you and your brother to one of my favorite parks, and by the time we left, you'd met and agreed to marry no less than three little boys. One of their moms sent me a picture of the two of you playing that I still have in my email.
You loved to swing, you would've stayed at the park to swing forever if I'd let you. When you were little, little enough to be in a baby swing (which was really through preschool since you were so tiny), you used to tell me to push you "soopafas" (super fast). But then you got a little older and decided you were scared to go too high... but you still loved the swings.
I know your favorite books. You would recite every word of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom with me. You liked to make me read the really long books on nights when we were already late for bedtime... books like Many Moons and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. You loved Buzz Said The Bee and The Cow That Went Oink. You would get mad if I made the animal sounds, you had to point to each one and say them yourself - "Oink-ha, moo-ha, cockadoodledoo-ha, neigh-ha, cheep-ha..." so that it took us about twenty years to get through the book. You thought "Oinoomoo?" was the funniest word in the whole book and would dissolve into giggles every time it was read. You really loved I Spy books and would ask to do one before bed - you were so good at them it took no time at all. We actually stopped reading Where's Waldo, because you found Waldo within two seconds of turning the page every time! You did like to point out the other funny things in the Where's Waldo scenes though.
You couldn't sleep without a stuffed animal. Ellfant, or your cats, or your webkinz. I can't count the times I had to go hunt one of them down before you would go to bed. You liked to put them all into sets too, babies and mommies. You had to have babies and mommies of everything, and you had such an imagination that they were always playing together and zooming through the air. For a while after you got your own room, which you'd never had before, I had such trouble keeping you in bed at night that I basically had to bribe you. I'd give you three pennies on your dresser before bed, and every time I had to come back in there to put you back in bed, I would take one away. You got really good at it and started keeping all your pennies, so we switched to two nickels. By the time we went to Florida last summer, we were on one dime and you were steadily breaking the bank.
In second grade, your best friend was a girl named Love. I have her picture in your yearbook. You used to write letters to her in class, but you'd get distracted and not finish them so they'd come home in your folder. Once you told her that you wanted to play with her on recess but you also wanted to play with someone else, so diplomatic, wanting to be everyone's friend.
You absolutely adored M. You copied everything she did, down to the smallest details... the way she was sitting, what she wanted for dessert, what she said... sometimes it drove her crazy, but she loved you so she didn't mind too much. You adored my mom too, and if she was around you'd cling to her like a magnet. You liked to help her kick the laundry down the stairs, dry the dishes, set the table, feed the cats. Oh, how you LOVED the cats, so much that I think they would've preferred a little less love! Once, I caught you in the bathroom with both cats and towels piled up in the corner between the sink and the wall, presumably trying to trap them in one place so you could pet them. When we got off the plane from Florida, all you wanted to do was go home and see the cats. I'm sorry we didn't get to do that.
You loved to play Webkinz and you were better at some of the games than I was. We would sit together and pick out the furniture for your animals' rooms, and when you went to bed I would stay up and play games to get you more Kinzcash to spend.
You loved the song Call Me Maybe, and you sang it constantly while we were in Florida. You told me, "Oh, this is my favorite song! Well, it's my other favorite song. 'Cuz my first favorite song is Taylor Swift." That song would probably drive me crazy if it weren't for you, but to this day I still listen to it on purpose, because it reminds me of happy times with my little girl.
You took the greatest care of your baby, Princess. You always made sure she was impeccably dressed, changed her clothes and diaper regularly, and before you went anywhere you had to make sure she was in her bed, all covered up, with her binky and her bottle. You loved to wear the dress that matched Princess's dress, and you always wanted to take her places with you so people could see how you matched. You loved your white dress shoes and called them "marching shoes" - I have no idea why.
If you were with someone who didn't know you well, you used to insist that you didn't like the crusts of your sandwiches, but if you were with me and you said that, I knew better and told you not to be silly, of course you did - and that was the end of it, because you knew I was right. You loved strawberries with sugar, I'm pretty sure some of your teachers thought I was crazy sending a little baggie full of sugar in your lunch for you to dip your strawberries in. You also loved those Cosmic Brownies with the rainbow chocolate chips on top, and oatmeal creampies... I think I still have a few of those lying around in a petrified state. You loved Honey Bunches of Oats with almonds, but if I wasn't watching you'd pick out all the almonds to eat and leave the rest of the cereal sitting there... so eventually I just bought you almonds, and you turned your nose up at them! You really loved apple juice, and when you were first learning to talk you called it "appadoos".
You had to have your bath the exact right temperature. You didn't like to take showers. You took your bath around room temperature, way too cold for me, but if it was any warmer you'd touch the water and shout "HOT!" Still, every time you took a bath, you were shivering by the time you got out. And even when you were big enough to get yourself in and out of the bath and dressed, you liked for me to sit with you and give you a big towel hug when you got out of the bath. You probably would've stayed in the tub forever if I'd let you sometimes - you always wanted all your foam letters and toys in there, and then you'd flail around like a fish and get water everywhere. The only time you took a fast bath was when the promise of something better after the bath was given - like ice cream or a favorite book.
You did gymnastics, and you loved to practice your flips at the park, but sometimes you were scared and did a modified version. You liked me to braid your hair before gymnastics, just like I always did for M. Your class was at the big red barn, and you always begged to play on the playground before or after. At first, you were scared of the balance beam, but by your last class the night before we left for Florida, you were doing a front flip (with your teacher's help) on it!
You wanted everything with princesses or Dora on it. I still can't walk through a store and see those things without thinking about how you would have commented "OH! I really DO want this!" You also liked to pick out a million dresses, go in the dressing room, and do a photoshoot with each one. Which is good, because I liked to do that too - you just looked so cute in everything!
I could go on forever. I could go through everything in your room and tell you a story about it. I could look at thousands of pictures and tell you about every one of them. If I took the time to write down every single thing I remember about you, I'd be writing for eight years - as long as I knew you.
I wonder about you today. What's the same and what's different. If I know my girl, you still love pink, and singing the most popular songs, and animals, and chicken nuggets. Whatever it is you love, I hope you have as much of it as you could ever want. I miss you, angel... but I will never forget one little bit of who you are. I know you.
And don't forget...
I love you like the moon at night; big, and round, and warm, and bright.
I love you, goodnight.
