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Every morning I wake up with an ache in my body that makes me wonder if monsters really do exist under my bed, and if they take turns using me as a trampoline through the night. If I turn my head slightly the wrong way, I fear it’ll just break clean from my neck; when I sit still in class for any longer than five minutes, my back will creak and crack loud enough to scare my classmates around me.
I plop onto my seat in Hodson 110, flipping the light gray foldable desk over and laying my favorite mechanical pencil and eraser on top, catching the pencil with my index finger as it threatened to roll off the edge of the table. There are 30 minutes until the first ProbStats midterm.
You know when you close your eyes, travel back to that one moment in time, the one that feels so real you can smell it, hear it and feel its warmth in the air? For me, that moment has always been Christmas. Every time I see the first string of lights go up or hear a familiar carol play in the background, I’m instantly brought back to this one memory: my brother and I standing beside our Christmas tree, our faces glowing in the soft light, completely mesmerized by the magic of it all.
Last week, my roommate and I were discussing our favorite early 2000s rom-coms (with “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days” at the top of the list, obviously), when she asked, “Hailey, are you against plastic surgery?” This question may seem abrupt, but it represented the accumulation of critical bits and pieces of our conversation: Samantha Jones in Sex and the City (Season 2, Episode 3, “The Freak Show”), the popularization of discussing cosmetic procedures on social media and the ways in which the female body has been turned into a trend. Ultimately, we had a meaningful conversation about what it means to powerfully embody or succumb to femininity, and how it has looked for us and those we care about as we enter our twenties. Let’s map it out:
Everyone who really knows me knows that I am ethically non-monogamous when it comes to careers. Even majors. At the end of all the one-night stands with strangers that I don’t have, I hear wedding bells and buy joint burial plots before the sun rises. The way that you imagine moving to a city after spending two days visiting, I flirt with the idea of dedicating my life to a career after one tenuously relevant experience. When I stitched closed the neck of a decapitated stuffed doll the other day, I imagined my name towing the credentials MD.
When the sun has slipped beneath the skyline – circumscribed in a rectangular panel beside my peripheral vision – I am beside my desk, index finger tendon taut with tension as I tap against a mouse pad. The time is 9:19, or 21:21, displayed on my blinking digital clock that’s two minutes ahead. Its glare spreads from the glassy confines of the LED display.
It is 5:08 a.m., and I am absorbed in a Freida McFadden book, having just discovered the joy of being invested in a psychological thriller. I am surrounded by LED cherry blossom lights and fairy lights to make my tiny dorm space cozy. No, I didn’t decide to wake up at 5 a.m. to start my day with something therapeutic, I stayed up until 5 a.m. to do something therapeutic.
Amid the usual onslaught of midterms and essays, it becomes startlingly easy to lose your grasp on time. The clock hands turn a little too fast for our liking, hours slip away to Brody study sessions and anxious Gradescope submissions, and days become measured not by sunset or sunrise but instead how many energy drinks you’ve downed.
My phone buzzed with a reminder from my mom: “Aaj Diwali hai, haath jodh lena.” I looked around my sparse dorm — the string lights I’d never hung, two Bhagwaanji in the corner — and slipped out before the silence could settle.
There’s something so deeply human about making something yourself.
The boy carries a white trash bag in his outstretched, open-palmed hand. Four distinct strands of hair stick up, like he’s been held upside down before being gently placed on the ground. He’s beaming as if he’s just heard the funniest knock-knock joke ever told; I can’t help but wonder what I’d say to him, if I had the chance. A decade-old relic, the view is asymmetrical: one of us triumphantly gazes into the camera as if to say, ‘we did that,’ while the other sits in a dorm room, the curved edges of a smile forming at the corners of his face.
For as long as I can remember, I would call my dadi twice a day.
“Austin! Marilyn! Come downstairs!”
Most days, you can find me in a child’s pose on a yoga mat either at the studio, next to my bed at home or on the hardwood stretching before my ballet class. It’s nothing extravagant, and often my stretching varies from a few quick minutes before class to an hour and half before bed. No matter what time of day or where I’m at, yoga and my stretching routine have given me stability and structure during times of tumultuous change.
What feels like just a few days ago, my biggest frustration was Grey’s Anatomy characters ragebaiting me: it was the COVID-19 lockdown; my last year of middle school had come to an abrupt halt. Another day later, I was speed-walking from debate practice and frantically trying to grasp basic thermodynamics concepts in AP Chemistry, which seems so trivial today. Yesterday, I was frantically journaling every minuscule event in hopes of a killer Common App essay topic, binge-reading college application guides at 2 a.m., convinced that one obscure extracurricular would determine the course of my life. Today, I am 20 years old. Blink, and somehow those “days” stack into an entire span of five years. Just like that, being a teenager – and more importantly, the vast majority of my youth – is already behind me.
Chapter 1: Feet, meet floor
When my girlfriend visited a couple weeks ago, I suddenly became self-conscious of how bland and messy my room looked. Despite it being week six, moving boxes still sat unopened and the decorations I brought lay on the floor untouched. For the record, I think of myself as a clean person. But with my new apartment, I had excused myself because this space felt temporary.
When I was little, I always hoped I would get glasses. I used to believe that somehow my vision would diminish enough for me to wear them, that my braces could match the lenses perched on my nose. Only with glasses, I thought, could I truly see who I wanted to become. Perhaps then, I could see the future clearly.
I am sitting on a fuzzy pink pillow in the apartment of my trainer, Dua, and I am about to share my whole life story from beginning to end with a group of five strangers.
Like a horse with a broken leg, I have come to face my own death sentence: I am a poet uncomfortable unpacking emotion.