A few years ago, I got picked out on a NYC bus by a woman I had gone to kindergarten with.

"Ohmigod! Do you remember me? It's Jill, we were in Mrs. Hacker's class together."

I looked up, startled, and tried to find the six year old Jill that I knew and thought I remembered pretty well. I searched this woman's face and saw nothing familiar.

"I remember you," I said, still scouring the planes of her cheekbones for a hint of the pixie child that was the Jill of my memory. "How did you know it was me?"

I mean, we'd been out of kindergarten for two decades.

"Oh," she laughed as though I'd said something silly. "I'd have known you anywhere. You're just exactly the same."

I smiled outwardly, and nodded as we'd reached Jill's stop and she got off with a friendly wave and a funny little smirk as though she thought I were kidding about not realizing that I was just exactly the same as I had been when I was five years old. It had seemed perfectly obvious to her, after all-- she'd approached me with no hesitation at all.

Just exactly the same.

Was I, truly? Am I still?

My husband's grandmother is fond of saying to me, "kid, the older you get, the more you realize that everything changes." And I know what she means by that. I look over the changes that the simple act of living every day has accumulated in my life. I think of the changes that have occurred since I met Jill on that NYC bus. I've had and changed jobs, careers, friends, lovers. I've moved from apartment to apartment. From city to city. I've met a husband and started a different life.

Except I'm still just exactly the same.

Aren't I?

Well, yes and no. I think. I'm not sure, you see. Sometimes I think that there must be some kind of core personality-- an essence of me, if you will. My sense of humor, the way I think about things, what kind of stories I like, my shyness, my self. These things existed when I was five and knew Jill in kindergarten. Or not. Maybe the only thing that connects the present me to the five year old me is my memory, and the fact that I did live as that girl back then. Maybe it's only the persistance of my memory that keeps alive the parts I've left behind in the process of growing up.

But then, how did Jill know? How did Jill look at me across a crowded NYC bus and connect to a little girl she hadn't seen in twenty years?

I can picture myself, as a child, very easily. I can remember clothes I wore, books I read, the way I passed my time. When I lie in bed with the covers pulled up around me reading a book with the cat sleeping beside me, if I'm not careful, I can start to think of a different cat, and the book becomes Mary Poppins or Anne of Green Gables. And it all seems just the same.

Amelia Wilson sometimes spends too much time inside her own head.