How is it possible?

I took Bella out to celebrate her fourteenth birthday, sushi dinner and then lavish dessert (that's her dessert in the bag, we're taking it to my place). I started Blipping the year before she was born, and she has grown up before our eyes. It seems merely a breath of time since her second birthday. Now she's as tall as I am, and she has cultivated the slightly-sarcastic, eye-rolling, almost jaded attitude that sweeps through girls her age. 

Her school takes students on field trips to visit universities, examining their options. Their most recent foray was just this past Wednesday, so tonight her chatter was of universities and her new best friend, a girl named Victoria who looks like she could be Bella's cousin. Bella showed me photos in her phone: the two of them on the bus, the two of them at the university bookstore admiring the merch, the two of them on the grassy track in winter sunlight, sprinting their way toward adulthood, not yet aware of the dangers because it seems that anything is possible, and it all looks enticing.