reflecting on my years being 18, 19, and 20

the divinity of change and how maybe the poets were right about time healing all wounds

as my 21st birthday looms, i find myself thinking of younger me and how magical it is that i never have to be her again. 

there is not a sum of money in the world that could make me relive the ages between 12 and 17. or 18 or 19 or 20. in fact, you couldn’t pay me to relive yesterday. i am thoroughly beholden to the passing of time and committed to never accepting an invitation to use a time machine. 

i tell everyone that eighth grade was the worst year of my life. the adjustment to the harassment and inherent loneliness that comes with transitioning to public school may not be as grave as when i went to jail or when i faked my high school graduation for 5 months, but it was to me.

maybe knowing what i know now, i could go back and handle the horrors of teenagerhood with more grace, or perhaps just less suicidal ideation, but that’s for me to never know. the what ifs, the would’ve could’ve should’ve, it’s all a fantasy and i’m content with the unknown. 

i do, however, enjoy being able to look back on all these years with a fully healed heart and endless amounts of love to give in my next year of life, to whoever may want it. 

that being said, i’m still a bitter, angry girl whose only pleasure is in imagining politicians dangling from trees. 

eighteen

when i think of being 18, i think of my ex-roommate that changed my life for the better, and then quickly for the worse. i also think about when i got my heart yanked from my chest by a boy i knew for 30 days. sometimes i wish he had died so that the mourning might have been easier.  

part of me liked the drama of waking up in emotional pain every morning, the other part of me didn’t like rewatching the 10 minute videos i recorded of myself explaining why my life was in ruins and that there was nothing to live for except a good lunch. 

life got more bleak after i spent 5 hours in a jail cell and had my world turned radically upside down. my only regret to date is that god-awful day in march. the government formally owns all ten of my fingerprints and my saliva. 

the jail stint was about 4 months after i dedicated a tattoo to a boy that i met on november 20th and no longer spoke to after december 19th. it sounds rather insane that we knew each other for 29 days and i am able to define, in part, an entire year to this person, but i’ve found that that is the beauty of being young and making mistakes that bear minimal consequences. i think i was written in flesh for the sole purpose of having feelings. 

and those feelings make great diary entries. afterall, who am i, if not a poet for my lovers? 

the story with my roommate continued a while longer. it feels odd to call her my roommate because, at the time, we shared a soul. 

she walks around knowing pieces of me that will never be known by another and she’ll carry me into her grave to be covered by the earth with my secrets.

i needed her in all the ways a person could. i’d sleep in her bed when she went to see her boyfriend for days at a time. she’d come home late and i’d wake up to her boots shuffling around in the kitchen.

i’d call out her name and she’d come into her bedroom to kiss me on top of my head. we’d exchange our i-miss-yous and our tall tales of the last 96 hours apart. 

she always used to tell me how much she loved my ego. in a world of people who would jump at the chance to call me a self-absorbed egomaniac, she called it love and she meant it. 

the first time she said that to me, it was clear no one had ever known me like she did. 

the knowing is what made us so close. the knowing is what was far more sensational than any act of doing.

it made the loneliness easier during the day, but the nights were vicious. i cried myself to sleep so many times in her bed, i think my body would have forgotten how to rest if it weren’t for the rhythm of my chest heaving up and down with sobs. 

i can hardly remember anything i did when i was 18 that didn’t have a duplicitous motive. it was always thinly veiled as an act of self-improvement or wanderlust, but just short of being genuine. 

i was a bona fide adrenaline junkie and nothing could ever satisfy the burning wishes of a girl who resented the sun, the moon, and the stars. 

the only reprieve existed between the fine line of friendship and codependence i had with my roommate. there were profound moments of clarity during the times we would catch up on each other’s day over a 5pm coffee. i could see everything i wanted and how i would never get it if i stayed put. 

the clock on my life started running backwards the day i met that girl. we went from strangers to soulmates, and back to strangers. i thought of her often after we stopped knowing each other, but i never felt sad. 

nineteen

there was a boy i adored, a new apartment, and a 60 day court-ordered house arrest. the end. almost. 

19 was the year i learned what unconditional love means outside of my family. i made a friend that i would give my life for in a moment (i still would).  

we became friends a year prior, but the depth of our relationship exceeded previous limits in the span of both of us being 19. 

i always told myself i never wanted male friends because there was nothing that a man could bring to my life that i couldn’t receive tenfold from any woman. then i met the boy and he snuck into my heart through an open window in my chest cavity. 

a few days after my house arrest was up, it was still the beginning of july and i drove to his house, thrilled to have somewhere to go for the first time in two months. we talked, we got in-n-out, we opened a bottle of tito’s, and we went swimming.

these were all normal things, but that night they felt extraordinary. i wondered how i got so lucky to have a friend that made all the mundane parts of life seem so sensational. 

he is the reason i so passionately object to the patriarchal, enormously misogynistic take that men and women can never truly be just friends. i find it painful that misogyny has seeped its toxins so deep into society that people have agreed that men and women must be sexual in order to be compatible. 

while i do believe that a strong majority of men are not capable of respectful, compassionate, platonic relationships with women, that does not mean that i think they shouldn’t be. i believe that human nature operates in a way that desires connection on all levels, but the conditioning of men in a patriarchal society has destroyed the natural way of life. 

to say that men are “naturally” more violent, more perverted, more of anything, is intrinsically wrong and detrimental to the way young men seek relationships out of women, whether platonically or romantically. it takes the agency away from men’s actions and reverts the blame onto biology, a lie founded on the basis of sexism and desperation. 

for these reasons, i no longer date men who don’t have female friends or who speak negatively of male-female friendships. it matters to understand the concept of loving a woman as a person opposed to loving them solely as women. 

of course, it is still a rarity to find men who are developed enough in their morality that you can withstand their company longer than five minutes; and i would never promote seeking friendship from men until it is safe to do so. as much as i have had a positive experience, i know mine is an outlier.

due to the scarcity of the friendship i’ve found in a man, i am deeply grateful for it to be rooted in the simple joy of being in each other’s company and knowing that reciprocity sometimes does exist when you give all of yourself to someone. 

during a time in my life of great uncertainty, i always knew who loved me. 

twenty 

i’ve identified as a communist since i was 16, but my politics grow more and more outlandish and divine every year. 

with being an outspoken communist and feminist, i’ve been told by many people that i would outgrow my passion for politics. on the contrary, my politics outgrow me and i become twice the anarchist that i was for every new person who tells me this. 

with age only comes further intolerance. i stay up late crunching numbers, trying to figure out when i crossed the line between angst and fury. half of my life has been spent trying to fill a void that can only be supplied by the downfall of the U.S. imperialist force. 

i hope not to salt the earth behind me, but to leave it in flames. 

this last year especially, i’ve watched a growing callousness appear between people who share the same philosophies and it’s as frustrating as it is counterproductive. 

many painful obstacles in activism often come back to a lack of solidarity within our own community. too many of us will die on a hill arguing over semantics, trying to debate other activists on nuance, and using politics as a playground for intellectualism. 

when a mutual on social media makes you mad, suddenly everyone forgets that our strongest point of resistance is in standing together; because policy makers and police are betting that you don’t know the name of the person standing next to you at a protest. they’re betting that when you leave, you’ll go home to the same people you do every day and neglect your community. when the police detain and arrest us, they’re betting that you won’t defend your peers. the power of the people is the power we give each other. 

that’s why when freedom breathes on your neck, many of you won’t know how to answer. 

…

my landlord refused to renew the lease on my apartment earlier this year and, while i think of all the excruciating ways i hope for her to meet her maker, i also think of how i’d be homeless right now if i didn’t have parents i could come home to.  

of course, my personal displacement is a mere inconvenience in comparison to the almost 2 million currently displaced Palestinians and the nearly 1 million who became refugees during the Nakba in 1948. 

it’s very easy to be a morally sound person and i regularly meet people who are insane. 

is it the fact that journalists will lie to millions of people for the opportunity to see their name in 12 point font on the washington post? is it years of cultish brainwashing from family and friends? or is it the societal indoctrination to strictly reserve empathy for things like shelter dogs and gofundme pages of people who got fucked by the american healthcare system? 

it’s everything, and more. that’s why i find myself so awestruck when i meet people whose hearts beat for more than themselves. 

my heart beats for all of the ones that can’t anymore. in Palestine, in Congo, in Sudan, the martyrs who exited the world in love were reborn in our resistance. 

…

in my 20th year of life, it has never felt more important to fulfill the prophecy of being an emotional woman. without the ability to love people i’ve never met, i fear i’d waste away in complacency. 

i got lucky with good parents and good examples, yet i still grew up feeling like the universe had committed the most heinous crimes against me. my underdeveloped brain would marvel at the sight of me now. in many ways, it’s nice to think that all the things i wanted to kill myself over when i was 15 are the things i love so earnestly about myself today. 

this is what i look forward to most about aging: the promise of newness. it is absolutely thrilling to be changeable. it’s the contract i signed with myself, to never stay all the way the same, but just enough to confirm my identity from the inside out. 

for my 21st year, i’m hoping for less surprises and more i love yous. but i’d settle for a surprise birthday party and everyone forgetting to say i love you.