Fourteen (Words, Worlds and Girlhood Teenage)

I want to share something.

Teenage never really goes away. We lock the doors, draw the curtains, sit in the drawing room with one leg on the other, pretending that we’ve grown up, we’re feeding ourselves, we’re living all alone and giving structure to our lives.

And… yet. Teenage comes back to catch you unaware as you dream of the world you dreamt of back when you were 15 again, as you watch turning a few of your teenage wishes into reality so sneakily that you wouldn’t have known without teenage creeping up behind you, as your mind calms down in a breathy atmosphere and you can think again, as you embrace the truth of your existence again, as you start thinking that, “Maybe, if I were a tad braver, slightly more impulsive as before, and with a little bit extra hope, maybe then – I would’ve found the courage to be me already.”

The would’ve doesn’t shake you, though. It builds a fine knot of the different ropes in your heart, and you step on it to keep it knotted (why-oh-why are my werewolf manga reading crimes popping up in my head) the rope and steadily climb to the sky. The sky isn’t the sky, though. It’s another beautiful world with another beautiful way. You want to stay here but your dreams aren’t just in your head now. You can see them in the clouds of this city, your teenage dreams shaping themselves into different objects of your affection; different concepts – ones you wished to forget so ardently because “I’m 20 now. I couldn’t possibly act like a young girl anymore.”

The path to forever girlhood comes after womanhood. Weirdly, it comes after you’ve realised that gender holds no meaning to you and that the common suffering you’ve faced on the basis of your genital type isn’t really what gender is supposed to mean. And yet, revelling in the skirts, traditions, and laughter is ever more enriching once you know you can revel in pants, more traditions and more laughter too. Perhaps, the years you spent wearing a tee and a half pant to music classes were the years you ended up cherishing despite wanting to forget it all. Perhaps, time closed up the wounds of family. Perhaps, you accepted your wretched fate more easily once you were out. Grateful for the morsels, forever, aren’t you?

You stopped writing well because you stopped reading well. It was easier to scroll and scroll through comics, pretending you were having fun – and you were – but pretending that you didn’t miss the words on the tip of your tongue, the way you rode on their backs like a different horse making you reach a different destination (another sentence) and then switching worlds every chapter. Just one book written the olden way, though – that’s all it took for your fortress of lies to crumble into rubble and your treacherous self to emerge victorious as if the adult you was the baby all along, the one which needed all the pretense of stability and growing up and a series of “I’m busy” when you were just sitting down, trying to make sense of why happiness was out of your hands.

Why wouldn’t it be? Of course, if you shun happiness, it will shun you. If you shun people, they will shun you. If you shun being vulnerable, the vulnerability in you will become a hidden monster which doesn’t want to see you too. What were you trying to run away from all this while? Your truth? Your naivety? Your everloving faith in the shitty world?

…And yet it survived. Now what, you absolute stuck-up dandelion of hope? Did you realise that you’re the fire as well as the flower? Did you see your duality? Did you see that maybe people love you because you love them and not because you like to do things in the name of “charity”? How many times have you lied about that one to yourself, huh?

Maybe your love is fleeting, maybe it comes with its own rules on betrayal and falsities, maybe it is not a reined horse but a free dragon. So what? Did you not find peace in owning up to having a monster sized heart with the capability to love albeit a bit too much at the imperfect times?

Let go, you idiot. How long are you going to keep your feet on the ground because “the ground is stable and this is what adults do”? How long are you going to deny yourself the dreams you had when you were seven, nine, thirteen, and fifteen?

“Do we ever grow up?” Who knows? Who even cares? As long as you’re happy, haven’t you grown up enough to cause and accept your happiness? Is that an achievement to be overlooked? Perhaps, in the mayhem of life, you forgot the faith you’d held in the power of the texts you have adored since girlhood. But did it forget you? Could it? Who forgets a lover so sincere as yourself? Would you, truly, if you weren’t yourself?

Such is the working of fate, my beloved. You have to keep climbing up worlds, hold on to the dragon’s back whenever you find it, make sure not to let it only breathe fire at others but also to have it fly you around and look at everything from the point of view only you can achieve. Is this not happiness? Is this not what you were looking for?

When you eat from a cup like it was a bowl and when you use a bowl like it was a mug, do you not remember how amazing it was when you first learnt their names, the texture of the words on your tongue, so sweet to taste, so sublime to pronounce? How could you have forgotten your first love? How could you have imagined that it wasn’t alive in you?

A 22 year old is a combination of all the ages she has ever been. You are still 15. You are also 17. So what if you are also 7 and 21 at the same time? Get used to it. Get used to being happy. Even if bad things happen, even if the worst comes to the worst, no one could ever snatch the worlds you spent your girlhood and teenage building inside yourself like monuments of worship. Such devotion is impossible to kill, even if you plunder and loot the temple. It shall rise again, it always does, it did the moment you entered it – didn’t it?

So, what exactly have you been so afraid of? Take the steps you want, run around in the bushes, touch all the leaves you want to – you won’t be dirtying anything. You are a devotee of words; you are a dreamer of worlds. You shall only know peace when you have your dragon and the dragon wishes to keep learning different ways of expression, the shifts, the slides, and the falls and rises. Hear the air around you. Aren’t your breaths sounding more courageous than before?

P.S. – This sat in the drafts for years. A stranger commented on my old post so I decided to post again. It’s one of my favourite write-ups. I hate how even this post might be taken away by shitty generative AI. Yet, courage is what moves us forward. I was happy today.