On 20.

It took me til September to see it. 

Sleep had neglected me for the majority of this wretched year, except once when I woke up from the soft epilogue of a nightmare, laughing. Haunted awake. The ridiculousness of my self-loathing in that moment forced me to sit up in bed and fix my hands in my lap to pray. ‘God,’ I started and finished. It felt sinful just to pray God’s name like that, in the same way I’d prayed plenty of boys’ names- even ones I’ve long since forgotten- but with no other words to vocalize the feeling: skin burning with teenage fever, love letter ink on my tongue. Many years ago, in this bed, I’d pitifully awaited replies and Instagram TBHs, pondered diets and other means of death, and wrote with Austen-like vehemence on the state of men. Here, on the cusp of 20-- no, the edge of 19-- I hunched like a late August plum, full of drop & rot. I was mourning myself, suddenly and collectively, along with the rest of the world’s sorrows. Two of my own losses in two months, two hundred thousand of someone else’s losses, two assignments due, zero motivation. Two and zero were a deadly duo. Having a visceral reaction to numbers was probably childish, and the trauma left from kitchen table math was only the half of it. 

Shadowed relics of my childhood loomed in the corners of the room. Hyperfixations and half-empty notebooks. The eye’s journey across this space is a diary without the pleasure of being itself bound or held in loving hands. Books I struggle to remember the storylines of. Necklaces bought on trips when the souvenir shop didn’t have my name (which was always), dull seashells sitting untouched in a glass bowl, that damn Twilight poster. Polaroids of new friends & experiences that adulterate the scene but ground me with their intrusion. Had the smell of child's play faded from these walls or had I simply forgotten it? A time when the mystery of Barbie’s dimensions was something I could feel, question, mechanize in all the ways womanhood made sense under tiny palms and through braided hair falling over a tiny face. The same face that, years later, my grandmother would caress with the back of her arthritic hand and coo in Arabic, “You are growing into yourself.” That was before. Before I was blessed-- cursed?-- with a body of my own. The thrill of it was not mine to have, after all. Corporeal delights, musings, and secrets belonged to men I initially sought to flatter before I saw their hungry teeth. I heard ‘need, need,’ and dropped low-hanging fruit, not recognizing the voice as my own. The tremble & dance exhausts me. Some girls my age are finding themselves comfortably at home in the chests of men, with diamonds to prove it. I do not envy them, even in my curiosity. A throng of men smells like nonchalance; what I hung in my closet but couldn’t wear out, at night, my joy corroding in a stranger’s pocket, the opposite of silence. The main allure of men is planted in me out of intrigue. To get close was to taste that carelessness! That is to say vanity, weakness and passion without the backdraft. To hold freedom in the form of flesh was to call it mine.

And what is womanhood except to be your own voyeur? You listen as your mother curses her thighs, your aunts count their weight in wrinkles on the rosary; in the tub you grow afraid of yourself. You need to pretend you don’t see them, so you busy your hands peeling tangerines, potatoes, and young collards with bound fingers. An impossible task. But these are the hard and holy things endorsed. Your father & uncles, with enviable unawareness, laugh in the other room. They too grew bellies and saggy skin, but when their white beards grew in, they cheerfully slapped one another on the back. To age without retribution was a luxury not afforded to the women in the next room over, who were looking in their mirrors, prodding their faces. These are the longest funerals. If you hate yourself loudest, nobody has to cry your name. It meant you never heard their love, or felt yours knock something over inside of you. As girls, we are born guilty of something; once women, we make the shame ours. It takes our milk and we called that our crusade. Being slave ships in shoes. We laugh about it and go home empty. 

Convincing myself that my fear of the twenty-somethings was irrational took too much out of me. If there was one thing that two decades-- no, 19 years, 355 days-- had taught me, I needed to validate my own emotions, no matter how outwardly silly. Twenty marks what I’ve deemed the daunting Decade of Doing: a public falling apart and coming together, an unholy union under the rule of cultural conditioning and the present nature of womanhood. A time to chase youth with anti-aging creams, or to carve a man’s home in my chest, or suddenly eject shame from that place inside of me to make room for children. I’m big enough to admit it terrifies me. How much of myself belongs to me?

In my proprioception, I pondered the hauntings of girls in almost-twenty-something bodies in their quiet rooms. Looking around mine, I reminisced on the sanctity of doll bodies before they became my own and smelled the wildness of what I thought womanhood would be, and waking up from nightmares that shouldn’t have been mine in the sleep I lost to my exhaustion. Trembling & dancing, trembling & dancing for the men with hungry teeth. Again, how much of myself belongs to me?

If I could do girlhood again, I’d ask to be made of light. A streetlight, the moon, a flashlight spilling into books read hungrily beneath the bedsheets of teenage girls, birthday candles, a lighthouse, a lamp in the living room, a reason to return. I spent too much time this go-around as a shadow of something bigger than me, something I did not and dared not understand. I blew it out, ironed it flat, yessired and no ma’amed it, tucked it into itself, sucked it in, cast a spell upon it, buried it deep inside myself-- all to cower in its penumbra. I made myself dizzy pretending to be unseen, experimenting with anonymity, listening, and recording.

The sun rose and harped the blinds of my room, spilling the golden salutation of day onto the bed. Then, and today, I am still nineteen. Perhaps one day, affixed, composted, or splintered, I’ll arrive back here. I’ll be a twenty-something with freshly aging eyes. I sink into the fevered sanctum of a dream. 

 “Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.” -Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride