21!

the moment i realize i am being seen is a jarring one. it happens all at once, or maybe it's happening slowly over time, and i just don’t notice until it is too late. until someone says you’re twenty-one in a way that makes me understand they are not. until someone says you’re a woman in a way that makes me understand that i am, in fact, not just a person, not just a being moving through the world, but something particular, something pre-defined.

i do not think of myself as a woman, not in the way they think of me as one. i do not think of myself as young, not in the way they remind me i am. i think of myself as myself, which is to say, not as a body, not as a collection of traits, but as a mind, an observer. when i walk into a room, i do not think about how i appear in it. when i speak, i do not hear the voice of a twenty-one-year-old woman; i hear myself.

but then someone makes a remark, says something offhand, and i feel it like a shift in the ground beneath me. i had not been thinking about my gender, my age, my body, but they had. they always had.

and so i realize, again and again, that i do not exist to them in the same way i exist to myself. to them, i am twenty-one, and that means something. to them, i am a woman, and that means something. i do not get to decide what it means.

i wonder if this is why, sometimes, i feel so close to people who, in reality, feel very far from me. all my friends are older. not by much, but enough. enough that my age is a thing to them, enough that i do not know if they think of me as i think of them. i feel no distance; do they? if i feel like their equal but they do not feel like mine, then what does that make our friendship? was it ever real, or was i simply projecting my own sense of closeness onto something that never existed.

there is a kind of naïveté in forgetting oneself. i forget i am young, i forget i am a woman, i forget i have a body that speaks for me before i even open my mouth. it is a naïveté that makes my own reflection feel like a shock, like a betrayal. it is a naïveté that allows me to move freely until someone reminds me of the walls that have always been there, the ones i had foolishly let myself forget.

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