Jessica Rosenblatt
When I was twelve I believed in God. I believed in candlelight and stained glass windows that projected rays of callously edged shapes on the carpeted floor. Burnt reds and dull ocean greens caressed the boundary where the hardwood met the fraying, tangled strands of shredded carpet. And the light that streams like honeysuckles trickles down. When they told me to encompass the light, I did.
I prayed that I would grow taller. That for my thirteenth birthday present I would surpass 4”5’. Instead, I learned how to mourn a person that wasn’t actually dead. I encompassed emptiness with every part of me but filled the void by finding meaning in meaningless, uncategorizable shapes. I toggled between wholeness and nothingness for the majority of winter but decided to be okay by the time spring had come. The rest of the year was dull and replays in my mind like a prolonged black and white film. Not the romantic kind where the characters dance in and out of bustling avenues, flouncy skirts trailing behind slender woman like veils.
For fourteen, I wished for boobs. I wished for other girls to be envious of me, but I got a cake that spelled my name with three e’s instead of two and the power to be invisible in the hallways. Fourteen brought a new school and learning to make new friends while staying true to “the real me.” And it wasn't easy to emulate the persona of a girl I was yet to meet. I knew I had to be myself, but somehow it was easier to pretend like I could wrestle tigers and lasso the moon in the nighttime.
Fifteen was another story, at fifteen I longed for thirteen and the days I deemed bad that I can no longer seem to remember or care about. I wished for ignorance. I wished I could look at burnt reds and dull ocean greens without being reminded of anxiety disorders, and prescriptions that needed to be picked up, and my mom’s expired train tickets. I wished to breath sea glass instead of choking on it because deciding to just be happy was easy, yet so unattainable.
I turned to new friends for guidance, the type of girls who seemed so far from the sun too. And they taught me how to obtain peerless, curled eyelashes and how to dance with your hips instead
of your heart. And it wasn’t long before my eyelashes looked like perfectly constructed commas and I had perfected their dance.
It took a friend’s stomach being pumped, and IV’s replacing veins for me to realize that the girl’s bones sprawled on that regurgitated hospital bed were my bones too.
And when I turned sixteen I didn’t wish for the endurance to stop loving the way the sun rolled off your face like honey on a spoon. Maybe I forgot to wish when I forgot to dream, or maybe it hurt too bad to desire things I could never obtain. It definitely did not help that there was a guideline for being sixteen: by sixteen you should know who you are, and by sixteen you should know who you friends are, and by sixteen you should know right from wrong, and by sixteen you should love yourself or even just tolerate yourself.
But what if by sixteen you have to reinvent yourself? What if by sixteen you have to invent yourself in the first place? What if, as sixteen turns to seventeen and seventeen turns to eighteen, what if I'm the lost, helpless girl immobilized in the hospital bed?
At twelve I believed in God, at twelve I yearned to encompass some sort of deity. At sixteen, the light I once revered is now broken and fragmented, at sixteen, I’m choking on force fed lies, counting down the days of an interminable cycle, learning how to breath on my own for the first time, trying to be ok. Or maybe I won’t be okay at all. And maybe my funeral won't actually be my funeral, empty caskets and empty eulogies to a person that never really existed, prayers to a dead god.