Fifteen in New York
And this was my secret. I could walk two blocks, I could get on a train. I could hand the conductor $4.25 worth of babysitting money and I could go to the city. By myself.
Penn Station on a Sunday morning. The magazine store with popcorn always popping behind the glass. The escalator that rode up and up into the streets I’d only seen with the permission of my elementary school teachers or with my dad’s hand squeezing mind tight. It was open before me and it was mine to take.
I’d heard names before — in books, sometimes, but also whispered in confidence at the Shabbos table from adult to adult, talking about their once-lives, their pre-children selves, their own private 1960s and 1970s rebellions. The Village. Union Square. Washington Square.
It was my turn now. And so I’d ask the policeman at the edge of the station, “How do I get to Washington Square?” And so find myself wandering down Sixth Avenue, watching the numbers of the streets get lower and lower. The sidewalks tossed with bits of trash, blowing around and rats scampering out from under a parked car to a garbage can.
There were hundreds of strange little stores — vintage stores with mannequins that seemed straight out of the 70s. Wig stores all fluorescent and mutli-colored. A whole store just filled with buttons.
And the avenue kept going straight into the horizon until it met the twin towers and then up and up into the sky.
Here everything was safe. I was just a blank, a girl walking down Sixth Avenue with a purple shirt, Converse sneakers, and a pulse. Nobody from home knew where I was; nobody here knew who I was. I was alone and on my own and the whole city, the whole world, was mine to explore.
DUDE.
“ The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed. ”
Søren Kierkegaard (source: misswallflower, via 221212)
(via rainysolitude)
I LOVE MEL.
ephemeraetcetera:
racheladler:
I agree with you…and I’ve tried really hard (and continue to try) to look at it that way. But somehow no matter how hard I try, the feeling creeps back at me repeatedly.
I realize it’s just a response to the values that our society has pushed upon me, but it’s really powerful response. I’ve never really felt anything like this. The other things that I’ve been trained to want/be as a woman didn’t really speak to me in the same way — never felt pressured to have the big, beautiful wedding or to be conventionally feminine in almost any way… and yet, somehow, this is different.
I guess it’s partly because as a woman in our society, our youth is a source of power (that sounds really nauseating, and it is wrong that it is that way, but I think it’s true). And to have it, and then watch it slowly slip away from me is a terrifying thing.
I aspire to be able to accept it. That was, I think, what I meant in my teens and early twenties when I proclaimed that wrinkles were beautiful and that I’d let myself go gray. I understood then that it was wrong to place youth on a pedestal and that there was value in age. But it was a lot easier for me to stand behind the truth inherent in that idea when I wasn’t going through the process.
It’s partially all the above and partially the idea of age (not relating to beauty, etc.) at all. There’s just a shock in realizing that I am a physical being and like all other physical beings, I too will age and eventually die. There’s knowing something is true and then there’s seeing evidence of it. And so here I am.
Yeah, I hear you. I’m 32, and when I smile, I really see it. Wrinkles all around my eyes, laugh lines around my mouth. But, God, if ever there was something you can’t control, it’s time and age. Age gets us all, if we’re lucky. Also, if we’re lucky, wrinkles are the least of our problems as we age.
I too just hate the way we treat age. We erase it. We ask it to shut up, to shuffle off, to go away. Leave our faces, leave our bodies. We hide old people away in places like the one my mom worked in. Women especially are under so much pressure throughout life: during the first parts of our lives, we work hard to look older, until at some arbitrary point we have to work to look young again. And why? I feel in Boulder, sometimes, like I am an alien surrounded by spry young things and people who wish desperately that they were spry young things. I think it would be so much better to be an aging thing among ancient things and young things, to witness a full spectrum of age. Sadly, the reality doesn’t look like this.
But the problem with worrying about all of our wrinkles is that it is fundamentally incompatible with living life right now, in this moment.
I’ve known you for three years now. In those years, you have become one of my best friends. You live life like no one else I know - travel, food, love, inspiration, writing, drawing, and all of these things fearlessly - and that’s one of the things I love about you. So you have a few wrinkles. Me too! You are beautiful! And maybe your face, over time, gives some small indication that you are a woman who smiles and laughs and lives.
And, I understand all the power theory behind this too. I’m not trying to belittle that because it definitely is there, it definitely exists. I just don’t think there are enough voices speaking at it from the other direction. So I had to go and open my goddamn mouth. I just feel like I see so much body shame, so much obsessing about this, about thinness, about age, about bodies being some unattainable normal. It makes me angry when it gets my buddies down.
So, fuck it. I’m having an attack of earnestness tonight, apparently.
I agree with you…and I’ve tried really hard (and continue to try) to look at it that way. But somehow no matter how hard I try, the feeling creeps back at me repeatedly.
I realize it’s just a response to the values that our society has pushed upon me, but it’s really powerful response. I’ve never really felt anything like this. The other things that I’ve been trained to want/be as a woman didn’t really speak to me in the same way — never felt pressured to have the big, beautiful wedding or to be conventionally feminine in almost any way… and yet, somehow, this is different.
I guess it’s partly because as a woman in our society, our youth is a source of power (that sounds really nauseating, and it is wrong that it is that way, but I think it’s true). And to have it, and then watch it slowly slip away from me is a terrifying thing.
I aspire to be able to accept it. That was, I think, what I meant in my teens and early twenties when I proclaimed that wrinkles were beautiful and that I’d let myself go gray. I understood then that it was wrong to place youth on a pedestal and that there was value in age. But it was a lot easier for me to stand behind the truth inherent in that idea when I wasn’t going through the process.
It’s partially all the above and partially the idea of age (not relating to beauty, etc.) at all. There’s just a shock in realizing that I am a physical being and like all other physical beings, I too will age and eventually die. There’s knowing something is true and then there’s seeing evidence of it. And so here I am.
It creeps in on you so slowly that you barely even notice it until one day, standing in a fluorescent lit bathroom, you peer closer at that reflection you’ve been playing with for years now, and at the edges of your mouth and eyes, on the once-smooth surface of your forehead, there it is: age.
~
How little I really believed myself capable of it. Yes, I would speak at 15, at 22, of that theoretical Rachel who would one day become old, her hair gone white, her body gone frail. But then I also believed I would become Suburban Rachel, trapped in a hell of her own making with her young children dancing around her as she cleaned the kitchen and thought about the logistics of her commute.
~
I escaped that but I cannot escape this. Can’t I just hear my smug eighteen-year-old voice echoing, “Well I’ll just go gray naturally” and “Wrinkles are beautiful”? Or the twenty six year-old me who came running down the driveway, excitedly, waving that first white hair. As though there would only ever be one. And oh, there’s a part of me that still wants to say that, to do that. But the thing is, it starts coming and I’m just not ready. Not yet.
“I had ten hours left. I was fourteen years old and certain of this as if it were a known fact. The following morning, they would wheel me into the operating room, cut me open, and in the process, they would kill me.
And yet there was something beautiful about this moment. On the cot beside my bed, my mother’s breathing was quiet and regular. I walked slowly across the floor toward the window, the tiles icy beneath my feet. On the other side of the glass, the Bronx danced alive and summery. It was early July, one of those nights where the moon is a giant smoky orange disc that seems to hover just above the tops of buildings. On the street, tiny figures in tank tops and shorts crossed back and forth. Even as I stood in an air-conditioned freeze, holding my arms tight against my body, my skin prickly with goose bumps, I could feel the freedom of that heat, that humidity, that energy.
Convinced though I was that this was the last night of my life, somehow I wasn’t afraid. I’d spent most of the last two years fearing these very moments but suddenly I was calm and completely ready.”
(The full story of my scoliosis bracing, surgery, etc., is here for all who are interested.)
Denver Airport, yet again.
Lalalalalalalalala.
I feel like I live here. I have no clue how many times I’ve been here this year but it’s probably a really absurd number.
Also I’m a little delirious.
