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The path ahead lies in front of you now in a blinding web of tiles.

When eighteen hits prematurely, the feeling does not follow with haste. Seventeen is the purgatory of age. It’s such a childish thing to feel so close to the brink of maturity yet carry the weight of adolescence into the last few steps. Nothing so far has changed. But it will. It is about to.

I go home to the ruminating unrest of a child’s bedroom that is preparing for the inevitable. The skin of Turquoise wallpaper, ones fresh with youth, shines with scars of the days I spent spraying it with off brand vodka and blood splotches, morphing with age and stories of the past. It is expecting a fallout I have not prepared for, and there is no pre warning but the promise of adulthood. There is a formal goodbye in order for a girl that is and also once was. I’m just not sure when. But there will be. There is about to be.

There has been a cavity tearing from inside out in the pit of my rib cage, nestled into form fitting bones. It’s spread to the cusp of my shoulders, the underlines of my collarbones, what once were contained to that crack down the middle of your chest. I realise how far it has grown, how agonising it was when once so small and misshapen in a child’s body. How painful the movements were, how prominent this towering essence was when I was a foot shorter and premature. The agony is spreading, seeping through the skin like a bruise with room to grow, the blood flow takes pressure off the centre, although the weight remains like it did four or five years prior. This fear is different. An agonising reminder of the future and the mystery of it all. Adulthood looms and I quiver the same way I used to. The throbbing takes ahold of something not yet visible. But it will be. It is about to be.

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How strange it is to be anything at all

A rambling of young girlhood

Theres a small portion of my past, a pocket of lost time with fading faces that haunt me like no greif I’ve endured before. The closure being the lack thereof, a slow progression into a new age of my life just out of reach of my most developing years, and yet this ghost visits me in the late hours in which I used to live.

There are people I shouldn’t miss that I don’t, but do in a way that is so cruelly consuming and confusing; that sneak into glimpses of my childhood years, considerably my worst, that knew the grip of a adolescent girl who didn’t know herself, only expected to find her somewhere within what they could offer. I did childish things and was reprimanded for them by my own people very different to me but similar enough to find community.

I still remember the sting of rejection. That first tangible feeling of a pooling empty sadness and humiliation I was thrown into the arms of when I had none to comfort but the promise of growth afterwards, though that would come with more of the hurt and evermore time. I remember boys, and a boy, a singled out idol in my wide eyes I worshipped on my knees in the slum of my own misery. Hymns of my adoration musically in videos expressing incoherences when I was drunk and free of the embarrassment of being a young girl experiencing the brink of teenage years. My first taste of love was when it was nothing of the sort but breadcrumbed in agony of subtle affection and space to remember just how incapable I was of maturity. He was wiser in years but still light with boyhood, an ending foreseeable for a long period but chased ignorantly with blind obsession. Crippling obsession. The kind of obsession that stunts your growth as you perform as wiser in your years and femininity but adolescent in your actions and round face. The sting of outright and whispered rejection, other women taller and older and competitive in their discovered romanticism, you watch afar the pull and push whilst you wait in the same spot, tucked between hope. I will never manage to free myself from the men of my past as there is still a child inside of me craving youthful affection. The masculine god you pedi stool and his power over a female mind will never truly be a tragedy to be reborn from but rather a near death experience you must pick yourself up after. Humiliation and rejection in that small pocket of time are all the men I have ever grieved.

Love, to me at that time, was an addictive gamble where failure is a permanent altering of your worth, and winning is the thrill of being seen as a woman through a man’s eyes. But it was a primal hunger of mine, the phase young girls have, to be praised and sexualised and lusted over because what is being a woman if not for the reward of being wanted. I longed to be wanted. There was a deep settled desperation to be wanted that became me entirely. I was no girl but an invitation to moulding, a hefty exchange of what I wanted for what they wanted me to be. Men had so much control over my past the grieving stems from an idyllic fantasy and ends at the reality that I was a child, Incompetent and wasting away at my years of self actualisation to make sure in myself I knew I was what I actually thought a man would want me to be.

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The counsellor tells me that I’m still a child.

That children shouldn’t have to protect their parents, that I’m scrambling for the scraps of adulthood they never bothered to baby-proof.

My mother has always bragged that I was eighteen before I even crossed the bridge of the teenage ache. Mature beyond my years, she says, more of an adult than she ever was at my age. For a second, as they laughed and agreed, I almost felt proud. It’s a nice feeling, to be praised for a curse you’re not ripe enough to grasp yet. I was still a child, after all.

So when my counsellor reminds me of my adolescence, tempts me with the promise of submission under a guardians hands, the thought is almost a bitter one, a statement I must defend. I have never felt more young than to be pitied by an old head that didn’t need my shoulders to cry on. I have never felt more young than to be viewed as a child.

Therapy has always been uncomfortable. The room is hot, sticky with the summer air I walked through to get to the doctors surgery where my mother works. My palms were clammy in the waiting room and a man dragging his daughter around by the wrist kept staring at me from the chair opposite. But inside the white office, face to face with a stranger, even through she pointed the AC in my direction after I’d profusely protested I didn’t need it, the thickness of the heat almost felt unravelling.

She asked me if I was nervous, as I stumbled over smalltalk and drifted halfway through rambling, that I was surprising to see, knowing how mature and intelligent I was.

I had never met this woman before in my life, and the only thing she knew about me was the promise of my maturity. The humiliation of acting childish was one I’d forgotten was so brutal.

And she asked me questions, a lot of them, things about myself, about what I was going through, and the sympathy of her gaze made me feel nothing short of pathetic. A pathetic, whining kid, stripped bare, even though I could feel every inch of where my trousers touched my legs, where the sweat was forming on the back of my shirt. But I held myself straight, answered with semi honesty, fiddled with my wooden bracelets and apologised for the grinding of the beads when they got too loud.

And then she told me I was still a child, that it wasn’t healthy to carry an adults emotions in a body not fit, that to protect my parents from myself was to burden me with the restriction of having a hand to hold, and I cracked like one.

All I remember, since I was just a child, was wanting to be held like one. To never be coddled was to grow up praised for strength, but hoping, every time I’d hurt my knee, or feel sick before school, or be crying after an argument, that my mother would give me a hug, talk quietly like I was fragile, feel an adults sympathy, cry a little louder and pray to be noticed, cry a little quieter because nothing was better than being told you’re dramatic, be scolded for being childish. wrap the sheets around me to feel a little hotter and beg that he softly asks if I’m okay, drag myself up and don’t complain so my father won’t roll his eyes and raise his voice.

I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted her to feel the weight of my skin, I wanted her to soothe it all; the summer I survived by a thread at thirteen, the way my chest ached, trembling on the bedroom floor at fourteen, whispering to myself, running my nails along my arm the way my mother used to, the anger I felt for my father, the hole in my ribs as he brushed off my self destruction, the guilt that was bile inducing as my mother scolded me, violently scrubbing sudocreme into the red hot scratches along my wrist before my first day of high school, asking me if I wanted people to think she was an awful mother.

I needed her to play house, I craved to play pretend, to have someone understand, to see the worry cloud her features, for her to pity me in the way I hated, I needed something, anything, I needed to feel so completely, pathetically, vulnerable, childish, lost and incompetent and so blinded with idiocy I needed to be guided to shelter, I needed her to hold my hand.

Instead I stared blankly at the wall, at the floor, at the posters on the board by the door and the peeling paint on the metal radiator as she wrote something down quietly. She tells me she wants to speak with both my mother and I, and my voice is hoarse and quivering, telling her what not to bring up, setting up the barriers of damage control, how not to anger her and how to avoid the inevitable car journey home where she cries I have to reassure and blame anyone but the culprits, just be glad it was her instead of my dad. I prepare to play house, prepare to play pretend, prepare for the next day where we pretend it didn’t even happen at all.

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I am blessed with a health I spend a lifetime doubting,

Aches and pains and worry’s, tight muscles, compact ribs,

I am an atheist with hope and no belief In salvation or futile prayers for the divine

The devil takes my hand and it feels like an angel

I thank him for mercy and hate him for spite

They dissolve into creases that tell my future,

I am spiritually longing but I do not awake from hell

Although I wonder if it is just me.

I have a million story’s but I am sickened with a discomfort as guilty as sin.

Judas is reaching out to me like an old friend,

I am desperate for affection, it overflows out of me and down my forearms

Through the rivers of my fingerprints, the dimples of centuries

Angels cry with a blessing of love that ballades like a herd

Antler locked, ripping the curse of fur from keratin

Lashing with the desire for sensation, brandished with tough skin to tear

Raw bone in a milky white, pearlescent spirits regrow in the spring, soft as velvet

The devil sits in challenge, the deer begin the rut

And everything dies in the winter.

Or maybe that is just me.

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I apologise to the moon, frequently, profusely.

The ceremony is silent and a weak attempt to reach the after.

They did not know her, nothing about her, neither did I, neither did any of us.

I have lived a thousand since the moon has fallen, it kissed the velvet of the rosepetals, the light of tears, bouncing off metal roof fixtures, reflections in the graphite of pencil and the dew in September.

The ceremony is horrifying and I know she is here somewhere, wondering about how many have shown up, the songs they choose, the skin of my neck prickles to think of a lazy greif and all I can say is

I’m sorry.

But I know that will not bring her back.

And we have been assured that today she is in rest,

Although she never really lived.

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There is a doves carcass on the corner that the boys laugh and parade around like a trophy.

Dull irises, grey pupils rolled into its skull

The skin of its chest pulling back to reveal a row of pretty white ribs,

Enough blood to obscure its face, enough to make a sin feel more like a toy and less like a tragedy

Enough to not feel human.

At the bench my friend asks me if I trust him

If I know him, if I’ve seen him at all

Less like a human and more like a man

He runs his finger along the dimpled skin of my ribcage

Says that that’s the best look on a girl

I say I know him, he’s a good man, the best.

I remind him of a bird he once knew, he says.

Back when they were untouched, white skinned and famished of humanity

I say I’ve never met anyone like him, he laughs.

He doesn’t know the colour of my eyes,

But he’d tell his friends the only way he’d remember them is rolled back, they’d laugh.

His hands on my chest, tugging at the skin

Like he’s digging for my heart, desperate for a possession to take home and show them;

A trophy of my love, I’d chorus, he’d choir.

Mine was a ballad of devotion, he was slightly off tune.

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And then you realise, somewhere down the line, that you’re a woman now. And all the time you spent running from adolescence hits you straight in the chest, a shallow dagger of childhood that tears straight through your ribs, the type of pain only a hug would fix; a giggle at your simple understanding of the world, the warmth of someone holding your hand, or gripping your knees as you parade around on their shoulders. You’re much too tall for that, now.

‘What happened?’ You know the answer, it’s a simple one, it’s always been the same. ‘You grew up.’ And it still stings every time you hear it.

You realise that as the old willow trees became rotting logs and no longer branches of your imaginary home, the stuffed animals you gathered as friends lay as strangers under a big girls bed, that when your teeth straightened out to fit your jaw, nobody grinned like they used to.

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Please forgive me for not believing,

if one day you face me at the pearly gates;

for i never received enough mercy to fool myself into believing that there is enough love in your heart for all of us

but if i did not notice your spirit,

and if you were carrying me all along,

please forgive me for claiming those victories as my own

for i felt no presence of God in the room that day

as i plead for delivery of my suffering,

writhing in the delusion of a saviour;

but rather my own dirty sinners palms

wrap around my body with salvation

that has never been replicated by the warmth of faith

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I’m flicking my hair in the school bathroom mirror whilst also watching how my face contorts and grimaces as nothing falls into place, and my skin looks a gruelling green in the luminescent industrial lights. I have never been pretty. I wonder what is wrong with me. This is a routine carried out on reflective surfaces, an impulse to scrutinise and an impulse of disgust. I cannot quite tell which parts of my structure look abnormal, but i know that all of them are masses of flesh i wish i could chisel and shave down to the bone to erase. I hate to hate myself, but it comes as naturally as blinking and engrained in me easily as breathing. I think that i have never truly liked myself, i wonder if that is weird. I am the only single friend in my social circle, i have never been flirted with and the only boy i kissed was when i was nine as a last resort before i even remember being able to make my own decisions. There is a sort of autopilot you spend years in at the ages you can’t quite remember, an untainted act of being alive where you are as free as a dog and as living as a lost memory. I was a little girl with little problems, and yet i was never pretty enough for childhood. The memory’s i have of youth are ones i wish to replace with the innocence of being young. I was never a child, i was a walking woman who broke her glasses on purpose because she was called names and cried when she was told she was fourth on the short list of girls her crush liked. I have always been obsessive. I have always been ugly. it’s been engrained into me before i even had the chance to realise it myself.

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Love is so dismantled in my body that my stomach churns when i think of softness and my tongue bleeds every-time i say your name.

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Things have changed and i’m edging across a tightrope away from my childhood and nobody’s holding my hand incase i fall. I hold my own hand and tell myself it’s going to feel just as normal but i know i’m lying. My legs are longer now but they’re trembling with a child’s fear who aches at the sight of the drop, i am no longer sure if the sound of her sobs are from the withering rope under my feet or the rapid decaying of baby teeth under her gums;

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Some things hurt me more than others, and i can’t control how or why. So when i see a song i know you’d like, and somewhere deep in my mind i picture a future of it playing through a vinyl into our shared kitchen, and you holding my hand while we dance; i find it hurts more when i think of the possibility you might picture that, too. So next time we meet again, and we unearth this cycle i’ve tried to lay to rest, please don’t tell me about a song you think i might like. Please don’t ask to hold my hand, please don’t wonder if i wonder about asking you the same thing.

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I wonder sometimes, i wonder too much, and i wonder if you even wonder at all.

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I am an eldest daughter. I wipe away tears and roll comforting words off my tongue like thorns, I let my own consume my cheeks and leave them staining a trail down my face as I turn away, head held high and act as if they are not there. I endure what I refuse to let my brother see, it eats away at me as I barrier a hand on the banister of the stairs, I do not let him ascend the steps of adulthood at such a childish age, I am the eldest daughter, I am forced to mature before I am ripe. I hear the symphony of my parents arguments, I stand a loyal guard behind the door knowing soon I will interfere and another wildflower of the childhood i cling onto will wilt at the sound.

I am an eldest daughter, told I have been 16 since I was 13 and thrown kicking and screaming out into maturity. I hug my own skin and comfort all the girls who have lived in this body before me, I am the grief of all that they have seen, the words they have heard, the consequences of childish children, I am the parent to a daughter I never was. I am an eldest daughter, I am responsible for the guardians responsible for me, I open and spill false faces like the dolls i played with not many years ago, but live far away in my memory with the call of mourning doves and an adolescent ignorance.