Sentence Analysis: Eleven

 "What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven. but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today."

In Sandra Cisneros' short story, "Eleven," the story of a girl named Rachel on her eleventh birthday is shown, and all boils down to being embarrassed in school on her birthday by one ugly red sweater. I picked the lines highlighted above because they really stuck out to me when reading and are the opening lines to the story itself. The way it is written, it makes you think about how you are every age you've ever been up until that very point, and nothing more. Almost like how if you think about it, there are no photos of right now. Photos taken now have happened seconds ago, but they exist forever in that moment.

I first read this story in elementary school, I can't remember what grade it was, but I remember reading it and the way the ages were listed really stuck out to me for some reason, and that feeling hasn't gone away yet. I think especially these sentences early in the story impact a lot, as they affect the structure of the listing later in the story as well, when the narrator wishes she was 102, so that being eleven felt insignificant to her.

 I think that's a really interesting way of experiencing time and age itself, that when you're younger all these mistakes leave such a bigger impact on your brain and weigh more on your soul, as compared to when you're older the things you have messed up on really are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. If I were 102, things I made mistakes on in middle school would feel so small and not important, but to me now, mistakes I have made in the past 8 years still feel wildly important.

Cisneros' use of age to show how significant moments are in a wider frame is such a creative way to use time, and I think that it does show a bigger message to anyone who reads it, I'm sure if a 90-year-old read this story they would agree that this is an insignificant moment, but a child would be thinking about it as much as they can.