the first day of the rest of my life

I am five years old again
standing nervously in my best friend's driveway
waiting for the bus to come by.
With a stomach of butterflies
and a too-wide smile, I am told
that this is the first day of the rest of my life,
where my feelings are marked as a photograph packed up in a box.
Only it knows now of my tight ponytail
that loosened through a day of nap time and recess.

Now I am older, by six years to be exact,
standing with old friends at the end of the road.
I am told this is nothing short of what may just be
the first day of the rest of my life.
The butterflies still flutter,
only by a duller beat of their wings.
They know I too am changing, and that my hair
once long and flowing now sits at my shoulders,
just brushed enough to not make it so easy to single me out.

Before I can blink, I am standing tall
under the shelter of a familiar school,
waiting for the bus to come and assure me that this may be
the first day of the rest of my life.
I find a familiar face and swallow my pride
in a school in the city I've never been to before,
where my rainbow head of hair proves
that its wings, too, have been changed and battered over time,
in order to prove I am a new face again.

But today, I am sitting in the middle of a class
no less that forty miles and a few counties away,
where there wasn't meant to be a first day,
but it is still one all of the same.
By now I am faded, torn from every aspect of me.
I have been through my chrysalis too may times before,
and both my hair and emotions have been worn and renewed
towards an ending it seems will never arrive
as anything other than the first day of the rest of my life.