Sometimes, if I sit by the window for a while and stare at the green pastures where my mom’s struggling garden lies, the quaint birds pecking at my Dad’s handmade feeder, or the old swing whose bristled rope dangles from the time-weakened tree branch, I am 8 and 17 again all at once. I relish, for as long as the moment allows me to, in the fleeting softness that used to spread itself across my face.
Sometimes, when I look in the mirror of my childhood room, a flash of a tear streamed face watches back. Or, when I sit on my turquoise chair at my desk, my journal opens up to a passage marked 2019, the words Dad, Mom, and disappointment wait for me.
Sometimes, I am with my best friends and I think back to when our problems were smaller but relative, they felt like a fire burning in our hearts and only teenage girl time could put it out. There is a uniqueness and delicacy to a shared adolescence, and I hold it in my hands as I hug them goodbye.
Sometimes, when I park my car on the left most side of my driveway, the way Dad always tells me to so he has room for his big, grey pickup truck and spring out of my car in the pouring rain, up the fading deck stairs trying each key before getting it right, I am the girl I long for, the girl who feels just out of reach.
Sometimes, when I curl into a ball and remember the way he used to lay next to me, pointing out each freckle on my nose and cheeks that emerged in the summertime, I am a teenage girl in love again. I almost forget that time faded out his silhouette, leaving resentment and betrayal in his wake.
Sometimes, if I listen through the silence, I hear my sister and I running through the downstairs hallway in a furry. I hear my high-pitch voice screaming in a fit of rage as she chases me; our voices colliding in an off-pitch melody as her fist does with my arm. I wait for a minute and I can hear my strange laughter an hour after as we watch Friends and scarf down rainbow Goldfish, her choice, of course. I feel youth and sisterhood vibrate in my bones until they hollow.
Sometimes, I bask too long in the remnants of girlhood. The pain and joy is bright and inexplicable; And it has born the woman who sleeps in my childhood bed. It is my two front teeth biting into a grapefruit, or my throat’s gulp of black coffee. Immediately so bitter and unforgiving, followed by a sweetness so brief, but intense you almost miss it if you do not seek it.
And this is all. There is no resolution. There is no happy ending. Just the bittersweet taste of girlhood.
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