I like to tell the adults in my life that I am doing my very best but they think I am lying. Lots of people who I love and vehemently hate tend to think I am lying. Maybe my face just looks like someone who lies. I’m not sure if it is lies that brought about my inability to maintain and the blame that comes with my inability to do just that. I am trying (as I like to whine) but it’s not enough. Adults know things, so I think they must be right. There is nobody to help me out of the rut that I’ve lied myself into but me though. I want someone to tell me what to do but I also do not. If I was told what to do in this sticky situation I’ve gotten myself into again I could maintain better. Then I would be blamed for one less thing. I disgust myself with the way I talk. I disgust the adults too.
Here’s the thing: I like to walk through crowds in unfamiliar places but only with someone else there who at the very least acts adult so I can be told, “Yes, go left,” and “No, do not turn around there, you want to keep straight; remember?”. That’s what whoever is with me usually says. My big question for myself now that I am old is this: Why do I want someone to decide for me if I so strongly do not want to do any deciding at all? I simply want to do my best rather than decide things so I can go blamelessly away from everything when I do inevitably go away.
I do not like how nobody told me how scary and vague all of the adult things I have to do really are when they’re looking me right in the eyes. For example, emergencies are scarier at night. So, when I gagged myself looking at my white and red throat with a cold handheld flashlight because that is what the adults did when I was young I decided that I should not wait until night to deal with it. I went to the emergency room for what I was very certain was strep throat at 11:24 in the morning rather than 11:24 at night.
When I was a kid and ran around in what adults describe as squares instead of circles I was okay going to the emergency room at night because there were adults with me who could calm me down. Now when I tell adults that I am scared and I am sick and then I complain of how much I hate being sick just like I would say when my body took up less space and didn’t intimidate, they tell me they’ve had it worse and to just see a doctor or take some vitamins and get good sleep. Even with all of that in mind, my first instinct still sat prominently in mind—I should have waited until night to go to the emergency room because night seems more appropriate for a visit to certain places like an emergency room. After all, a scary looking sore throat could be classified as an emergency if it feels especially bad at night when no other doctor is open. During the day (if I choose not to lie of course, which I rarely choose) I am left with the lame excuse of: I hate the doctor so I don’t have one I normally go to and the health clinics on the side of every freeway ever in Texas never give me antibiotics when that’s really what I need. The only place that will give me what I need is the emergency room which I feel bad for visiting when it is bright outside. I can’t help that I know what I need and know who will give it to me.
The morning I went I spun into a little bit of an exception to my rules about the dark. It was raining. That makes the day slightly darker so it’s closer to being night. I wouldn’t have wanted to go at night anyway. At night there’s nobody around to call and cry to, at night the pharmacy that doesn’t scare me so much isn’t open so I can’t get medication there, at night the hill out back of the emergency room parking lot which I have only visited one other time on my behalf but four other times on the behalf of others looks like it’ll come falling down on top of me to put me out of whatever mental misery I am in.
Before I left the house in my dented blue car that had recently become my own, I brushed my teeth just the way I like to. When I was brushing, I looked up at my reflection in the mirror which I tried to clean again with a Clorox wipe and then spit up on the same night. I had spit up again as I tried stripping away the white goo in my throat. I thought maybe at night it would dissolve. I seemed to have forgotten my rule that things fester overnight, they rarely get better when you leave them alone. That morning I watched the warm string of saliva run down my chin from between my permanently chapped lips that seem misplaced when you take away the rest of my facial features. Sometimes when I brush my teeth I think about how some people look at their lips too as they gag themselves to make dinner come back up. Sometimes I think about how some people, like me, forget to brush their teeth and only remember before they go to the doctor. What would the adults say? Watching spit dribble down my chin and touch a porcelain white sink is like a reward, a pat on the back which I am supposed to administer to myself once a day, to remind myself that I did a good thing.
The intake nurse asked me lots of questions; she asked me for my social security number which I have a hard time remembering the last four numbers of, she asked to see my throat. She was more worried about the numbers than the throat she was supposed to fix for me. I just have a hard time remembering important things like the numbers she wanted from me. I remember other things like all of my trips to the grocery store which is what I thought about while I waited around for nurses that afternoon. Most stories I tell revolve around grocery stores and I’ll tell you why. Three Decembers ago I asked adults if I could go to the store alone to get some groceries. I wanted to feel helpful. Adults tell me that is the right way to feel. I drove the car that is now all my own which I’ve scratched up and thrown trash in to make it so ugly on the inside that nobody will want to steal it from me to the store, which is conveniently ten minutes away. I had wired earbuds in and a hat on and it was very cold outside. The inside of the store was a regular amount of cold. People tried talking to me and I looked at their faces and the way their lips moved. Lips are very strange things. When I got home it was decided that I did good at the store, so I could keep going by myself to get groceries. I like routine. Every Sunday after that one I would go get groceries for everyone in the house. Sometimes I snuck in foods that I liked to eat.
The new nurse that came to see me told me I might not have strep throat but a virus instead and said that my body is catching up to its own age. She took my blood and I can’t look at that so I thought more about myself. I don’t do that often. I think I am pretty bad at maintaining it because the adults tell me that is the truth. I have been told that my impulsivity leads to mistakes—I have been told lots of things and most of the time they are not entirely true. I think it is hard to make a judgment on someone or something when your own vision is impaired. I think there are lots of things wrong with me but one of them is not my willingness to be good. I just lie to protect the things I love from adults and have a hard time maintaining. “The good stuff is coming,” I like to lie, “I can just tell.”
I thought about the one part of being an old girl which I think is sort of funny is how I get invited, unknowingly, to have communion which will always result in conflict. I don’t like to use absolutes. Nothing is final or my own. I meet a lot of interesting people the more often I experience communion; I try to do it nightly. I meet a lot of people that don’t quite know what they are doing but in different ways than me. Some people do what I do and they let the real adults make decisions; some think they are adult enough to do it on their own. Those people in the second group are okay with making mistakes; then again, recently I met one who, like me, is not okay with it. An older girl than me turned as we ate and told me people come in all shapes and sizes. She told me that she’d been alone for three and a half years and that was pretty good. I laughed, squaring up, ready to tell her I’d been alone for twenty two. She and I don’t get along well. I think it is because we aren’t talking about the same “alone”.
I left the emergency room about four hours later and told myself I would go to the library for a little while, just to read and maybe catch up on the other things I was supposed to be doing. Instead I went for a drive to think about what the nurse said as she looked over my body and pressed her un-gloved hand against my stomach. A lot of the times when I drive around to think are the times when I almost crash the car. I’m not sure if I would be the one who decided to do that if I did crash the car someday.
It was odd having an adult look over my body at the emergency room. My thighs are stronger, they are thick, blending nicely into hips that I didn’t think could change shape any more. When I dance around my room at night all dressed up in clothes I am afraid to wear, I can see contours and muscle that weren’t there before. I can see how my calves which I spent ages thirteen to sixteen hating because Roxy’s calves looked so good finally fit in with the rest of my shape. I like how my knees aren’t so knobby. (These are all qualities that I suddenly, grossly, value). I pay attention now to how my nose is no longer the cute thing I once regarded it as and instead focus on the particular pig-ish way it smooshes against the various things I press my face against, constricting my breathing more than it already is. My body is changing so the maintenance required has changed from a type that suited a girl a little too well to a type that is difficult for a woman to keep up when she doesn’t feel too good. Recently my hips don’t fit into the same jeans I have worn since my junior year of high school; I cut them up and ruined them the night before I went to the emergency room and cried over the loss as their parts laid bleeding on my white carpeted bedroom floor. At least they were cut up and out of their misery like I wish I was on my worst nights. I like that I can’t ruin good memories with the jeans that don’t fit. They are dead. There is a bulge under my belly which I was glad the nurse did not point out. It indents like fat but could be some unknown viscera; I worry the more I grow into my new body that I’ll get a small pouch there like my mom has which I spent my entire childhood thinking was gross. I pride myself on being too skinny and fitting into size twenty-five pants every week of every month except for the six days that I am on my period and my stomach doubles in size from bloating and water retention. I have gotten older so I eat more especially when I see the boy I love because I suddenly stop lying about how hungry I’ve kept myself for most of my old girl life. I didn’t realize it was okay to want to eat or enjoy the way my body looks when it’s one-hundred-and-eighteen pounds instead of one-hundred-and-ten or one-hundred-and-thirteen if I am especially full.
On the steering wheel my fingers were truly long and slender and I finally saw what Mr. Zubi meant when he said there was a difference between the hands of a girl and those of a woman (a memory which still deeply disturbs something in me; I think it was the way he said it with a small smile and how he walked around the classroom having the girls put out their shaking hands so he could prove his point).
I pulled over. This was too much to think about. So much on me is uncomfortable when I put my new body in new situations that come with having a woman’s body which I thought I desperately wanted and just plain needed to feel grown up but now I see why innocence is prized by adults and how those situations could be so wrong and hurtful to my already hurting, adjusting body if things are experienced with a bad person. I finally see myself in the lustful way I never thought a man would and I am scared for myself.
Today I was at the grocery store and nobody decided for me that I would go or that I am good at it. In fact, it was decided a while back that I am bad at going to the store so now the adults in the house do not like for me to get their foods for them. I still think deciding is hard but I’ve got ways around it. The times I do decide it is always a bad thing. Don’t get me wrong—remember, I told you bad things still happen to me even when I don’t decide things all alone. I’m rarely doing exactly what adults think I should be doing. I have tried to force myself to see the benefit in doing things in an undecided way. People at work like me better, they call me flexible (that’s a buzz word). I agree, I say, “Yes, I am so very flexible that you can just tell me what to do and where you need me and I’m there.”
In retrospect, I am still letting adults decide for me. How funny is that? Big decisions are never really my own. I’ll tell you a secret though: When I sat in the emergency room waiting to get help, the thought did cross my mind that the goo which sat thick and yellow to hide tender redness which my throat ached with was probably a reminder that I do like to lie. It’s a vague secret but the best ones tend to read like that. You can take my secret however you’d like to; I doubt I’d tell the truth if you asked me. But really, when you stop to think about it, how bad is it that I like to lie so I can feel okay with making decisions on my own? Hidden things and not-so-nasty-as-they-seem secrets protect me. I can be undecided with some adults and learn to be decided on my own time. Nothing is dangerous…maybe just a few things were.
The deeper I sink into the ways I like to make decisions, it becomes harder for me to tell what I’ve actually done from what I’ve imagined (out loud). I am paranoid over the reality that my lies will be found out. Everything is permanent, even in someone else’s memories. I do not like the way that I am seen, especially now that I am old(er). I think it’s silly that pretty thoughts of me from when I was little and twirled in my pink polka dot skirt from THE Gap and would sometimes smack people with my sparkly pink purse on purpose while I twirled is ruined by gross, hateful thoughts of me now when I do things like run through crowds apologetically and accidentally smack someone with my black nylon purse while wearing oversize barrel jeans from Urban Outfitters and a THE Cranberries shirt that’s a size large instead of a small. I made decisions to purge my closet of pink because I don’t like it all that much, I prefer purple, and from there it was all downhill.
My decisions got and still get questioned and this goes back to my point of what should I do when I need to decide? The emergency room doctor told me to get my blood drawn again in three months so I could see if I am still sick. I don’t want to see if I am still sick. If I am, I’d prefer not to know and to just someday die. People might wonder why I’ve died so suddenly but deep down I knew why. It was because I was sick and decided not to know. The adults don’t like that logic so I’ll shell out thirty bucks and two hours to drive to a doctor that can draw my blood in five months instead of three. Procrastinate. That’s a way I can contribute to decisions I do not make. Now I get to think about whether or not I will lie when the doctor calls to maybe tell me something looks wrong.
Now that I am an old girl I can decide lots of things that aren’t so related to the way I live my immediate, tangible life. I can decide not to take on the happiness of the adults around me and I have decided to do just that. They didn’t like that one either and it was too late to lie. Lies don’t work as well if you backtrack on precedent you’ve already set.
If I am already hated for the small decisions I make, lately I figure I can make a few more if I do it quietly. I like to drive around in my blue car at night in the rain. It’s scary. I go slow and I worry but it is the exposure to the worry that I think pushes old girls to do a little more. I ask for more shifts at a job nobody but me is happy that I have that lets me work late into the night so I do not have to go home where adults might try to tell me what to do with my life that is supposed to be all my own. I am an old girl, if nobody will treat me as such, I suppose the lies I like to make will force their hands into doing what I want.
At the end of the night when I come back home, I walk through the door and my name is being yelled. Adults used to say it pretty. I say, “I’m right here,” and leave it at that. It is nice to have one thing every night that is easy to think of and hard to misconstrue as another one of my lies.
Before I close my eyes, I remind myself of some very important things; two truths and a lie to make a nice three beliefs that will help me placate:
I am an old girl, I am a daughter, decisions cannot be mine alone to make.
I am an old girl and cannot do anything to make myself young again.
I am an old girl but will never be an adult.
