Thirteen

I remember it happening too smoothly, crisp, like undressing a page,

suddenly jotting the years in a shaky margin. Snapped hair ties,

classrooms fueled with too many elbows, academic pulses a mystery,

a shape on the hill—too far to call.

I remember my dad in the kitchen, teaching me how to chop vegetables,

first, with a mushroom, soft, mellow, easily succumbing.

‘There you go. nice and easy’

fingers flailing and the fear of pain

because I did not have many fears, then.

Glittering studs, half-braided locks, tasting the word identity,

then facade, then later, shame. The girls learnt that earlier though,

in the summers where they were told their childhood died through bloody gain.

I remember lunch queues groaning and seizing in crowd bubbles, high on

the sweet steam of hot crusts and canned towers

‘then you flip it over’

Straightening school skirts outside the gate, girls with wide eyes hustling cold breath

cursing long legs or lack thereof. The underside of rebellion stealing paper-clips from

exam papers, just to remember what your heart feels like, the form of it, bumping

and skipping like losing friends.

Dreaming silly, of shapes on clouds or curtains closing, symbols of ignorance

and parodies of the mundane. Your life defined by

extra-curricular and niceties, just to be a category. The sheer certainty

of being someone else, a child caricature or a nobody—

oh, what a strange collection of days.

‘then, you go again.’