Eighteen by: Anjenette Silvano Illustration by: Jan Clyde Napiri
W
hat I don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell me is that when I’m eighteen, I’m also seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, and so on. When I wake
up on my eighteenth birthday I expect to feel eighteen, but I don’t. I open my eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And I don’t feel eighteen at all. It’s like I am underneath the year that makes me eighteen.
Like some days I might say something stupid, and that’s the part of
me that’s still eleven. Or some nights I might need to sleep beside my mother because I am scared, and that’s the part of me that’s seven. And maybe when I feel like everything’s so messed up I will need to cry like if I’m three, and that’s fine.
Because the way I grow old is kind of like onion or like the disposable
cups that fit one after being piled up by another, each year above the next one. That’s how being eighteen years old is.
I don’t feel eighteen. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks
even, sometimes even months before I say ‘Eighteen’ when they ask me. And I don’t feel smart eighteen, not until I’m almost nineteen. That’s the way it is.
But when I think of the things that are supposed to happen, I wish
I was one hundred and eight so could tell what will happen next. So I could tell what I can do when things get worse. I wish I was anything but eighteen, because I want today to be far away already, far away like the tiny dust in the sky, so tiny that you have to close your eyes to see it. But no, I’m eighteen today. My mother died. This is when I wish I wasn’t eighteen, because all the years inside of me- seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, twelve to one- are pushing at the back of my eyes.
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