on turning twenty

and failed metamorphoses

Author’s note: I’m so sorry for the delay, exams took my brain and jiggled it upside down and inside out until it turned to mush. Here is a long, long, long overdue post, a short, relatively unfinished draft from just after my birthday this year. A couple more posts are in the works, so have this as a placeholder my lovely (extremely patient) audience xx

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Every few months I decide I want to shed my skin like a snake, emerge newborn. I will look down in the shower as I wash off the viscera of birth and blanch at the absence of my umbilical cord. Proprioception betrays me; I can feel it. The body, unpersuaded by metaphor, remains stubbornly whole.

I felt it particularly strongly a few weeks (now, months) ago, on my twentieth birthday. Entirely convinced I would enter a girl, emerge a woman, I dipped a toe in the still-freezing water of the shower basin, and retreated, hissing. As I stood, now shivering, I considered whether I could truly stand to shed the skin I had so painstakingly grown. It had served me well.

In the shower that day, I grasped tightly to my skin as I washed, willing for the first time that it would stay firmly attached.

Steam climbed the walls in thin, uncertain sheets, collecting first at the corner of the shower, then rushing over it and settling over the mirror until its reflection disappeared entirely. Water ran in rivulets down familiar paths, obedient to the same inclines it had followed for years. I, faintly disappointed, searched for evidence of change in the fogged-up glass: a sharpened jawline that may cut suddenly through my chronic baby-face, a sudden authority in posture, some newly granted elegance with which to shampoo my hair.

As a child, each year came freighted with inherited ideas of a new self, as though age were a costume laid neatly at the foot of the bed overnight, and if each of these costumes were simultaneously stripped away we may emerge again as we were straight from the womb. Yet each time I woke exactly as I had slept, only now expected to answer to a new number.

Perhaps this is why I return, every few months, to this fantasy of renewal, the seductive thought that one might interrupt the slow administrative work of becoming an individual, and instead emerge all at once, indisputably altered. To split cleanly from the person who had gone to sleep and leave her behind like transluscent casing.

By then, the water had begun to cool, and with the cold came impatience. My fingers, now wrinkled at the tips, looked briefly borrowed from my future.

I wiped a circle clean in the mirror and gazed at my dripping face, eyes slightly red from a particulary clumsy attempt at shampooing my hair. I smiled at this slighly bedraggled girl. She stuck her tongue out in response.

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Yes, as much as it has seemed it for close to a year now, I am not ghosting you all, just dealing with a particularly severe case of writers block induced by the panic of a second-year literature degree. I am determined, and hold me to it this time, to write more for you, and for myself!! As always, my inbox is open for suggestions.