i still remember the context of almost every argument i've had with my parents. i don't know if that is out of sympathy for a little girl, or from the stubbornness of a still immature soul. maybe it's neither, but instead an adolescent affinity for another like me, even if she doesn't yet exist.
my mother probably cried alone in her bedroom at sixteen, and i often think about the fact that the vexed determination to understand and assist her future daughter likely came over her during these moments. yet even if she was less strict and more supportive with me than her mother was with her, i, too, cried alone in my bedroom at sixteen. i toyed around with an idea of the impossible- to actually meet the young woman in her authenticity- and i wondered if she'd be able to comprehend my afflictions and concerns better than the existing woman in the other room would.
it seems that adolescence is some sort of a trip- its unique and emotionally intense experiences leave you enlightened, but once you get sober, the integral feelings of anxious butterflies in scary territory and sole shrubs in desolate tundras and agitated geysers barely suppressing their bursts all begin to slip from sensory memory. eventually there are only spreadsheets and schedules and channels so narrow they are unable to make trips to the chest. the arduous resistance movements led by those who had the pulls of the earth fighting against them yet persisted until the sun came around hold no significance anymore. i can't help but believe that the awaited journey into adulthood, and eventually motherhood, are not the emergence of a butterfly from a cocoon, but the bleak inevitability of empathetic and open minds succumbing to propriety.
forgive mine for feeling that they deserve
a headstone. i'll have casted it into the landfill of the dishonorable within the next decade.
