XVI

Now Playing: Drumming Song by Florence + The Machine (there's a drumming noise inside my head that starts when you're around, I swear that you could hear it, it makes such an almighty sound)

I think I might have mentioned earlier that when I was little my goal in life was to turn sixteen.

...which does sound rather morbid, but I don't mean it that way. I always knew I would be sixteen, if that makes sense. Most of my medical scares and operations happened in a time and place where I didn't link hospitals and pain with death and mortality. It was only when I got older that I realized how fragile life is, and how my life is more fragile than most.

I don't know. I knew something big would happen at sixteen. I could just feel it. Sixteen seemed so wonderfully grown up, when I was little. I thought all my dreams would come true at sixteen. Sixteen...I used to count down the birthdays until I turned sixteen.

Sixteen has not been a dream. I spent my birthday alone, utterly abandoned by my friends. I don't think I've cried so much in my life before this year. This year...has been crazy and confusing and disorienting.

But this year has been the tipping point. I'm not a child anymore, and people have stopped treating me like one. I'm not entirely sure if that's a good or bad thing. I'd always been the baby, always been treated like a baby...but then there have been moments where I was definitely not a baby and it's been quite scary.

I've only ever been judged by my brain, by how I can put pen to paper. I've only been judged in the sexless void of academia and education and hierarchy. This year is the first year people have started to see me as a woman, as a person with feelings and emotions and intensity, someone in need of initiation. And it's been like a dream; vivid, intense, surreal. Beauty of the mind is all very well, but I'm still a physical, aesthetic person. I like the effect I have on people, sometimes - I like how newly minted everything is, and how in all my awkwardness and shyness and naivete and inexperience I can sometimes provoke a reaction that I never dreamed possible. Everything is heightened when you're young, and I love every moment of it - the pleasure, the pain, of being alive. Being sixteen has robbed me of my insecurities with cruelty and kindness.

I guess I always knew it would come to this. I don't know why, at such a young age, gut feeling, intuition...I just knew something new and exciting would happen at sixteen. I don't know what made me think of sixteen. But innocence to experience comes, sooner or later. And nothing's gone to plan, but I guess I should have figured out by now that I'm not the kind of person who should expect any degree of normality in my life.