Most people love reminiscing about their childhood. Buffy especially. (I can tell. Her left cheek puffs out when she's doing it and her eyes look a bit cross-eyed.) She likes looking back to the days of Power Girl and the naive in-crowd girl of Hemerey
Okay, saying it like that can give a person the wrong idea. It's not like that simple with Buffy. She can talk about a normal life‚ until the Fyraal demons come home, but she wouldn't change anything. Being the Slayer, or a Slayer considering there's a couple hundred of them now, is a part of her. The rest of the Scoobies may be fooled by her act, but I'm one related to her. Plus I've read most of her diaries. (That was years ago! I swear!)
Nonetheless, she loves looking back. Laughing at the innocence of her quirks of her past. The days where the light was more familiar than the dark.
In a way I envy her for that. I don't like looking back anymore than three years because that's when I see things, notice things that scares me. Not in the Big Bad sort of way or traumatizing sort of way. I wish it was. I know how to deal with that.
I'll explain, but don't judge too quick.
My so-called childhood sounds like something out of the Sweet Valley Twins. I loved pink and purple. I played with stuff-animals, My Little Ponies and Barbies. I read Nancy Drew and listened to the Spice Girls. Virtually every stereotype, I had. It even continued as I got older. I even developed a typical-girlish crush on Xander.
When it came to the Slayer stuff, I was almost always absent, or was somewhere safely tucked away. On that one freaky Halloween where everyone turned into their costumes, I was stayed home for no good reason. For the entire Angelus thing I was at Dad's. The same thing happened for the time the zombies attacked our house. The most of the rest of the time, I was at friends' houses. Truth be told for the little sister of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I had seen suspiciously few demons.
But around the age of fifteen, my entire life changed, simply because that's when it first began.
Within months for no apparent reason, I lost most of my friends. My feelings for Xander evapourated and instead I started drooling over Spike. Suddenly I was running into demons everywhere. Nowadays, my life and habits barely resemble that of the Dawn Summers of my earlier memories, the Dawn that never was.
But that doesn't matter, right? Those memories are what makes me her, right?
These are the questions that haunted me and still haunt me.
It was the first time I truly understood Buffy. You've got to pretend that you're strong and happy, not for yourself, but because of you don't want to hurt those around you. They don't know. They can't know what it is like and they don't know how to help. In the end, all you do is hurt them.
So you smile and nod assuringly, and maybe if you're lucky you'll convince yourself too.