Afterimages.

That’s what they’re called—those spots you see after looking at the sun, the ones that appear when your eyes can’t quite process the intensity of the light.

Girlhood is a light I am still learning to process the intensity of. I see spots every time I look away. Spots that are not really there, spots that no one but me can see, spots that my brain has concocted as a mere compensation for what it has witnessed.

A child running barefoot under the sun, clutching daisies in her palms, about to fall down a rabbit hole that will render reality unrecognizable. By the time she finds her way out again, she will be stumbling around in the dark, fumbling for the light switch. She will find it. But she will have to fumble for a long time first.

When I was a kid, nothing excited me more than the promise of womanhood. I thought it meant having a big laugh and wearing a bra. Saying all the right things while elegantly holding a glass of wine, knowing something. This was what it looked like from behind my mother’s legs.

Womanhood would turn out to indeed be about knowing something, but no one could tell me what exactly it was.

Where is the line? When does innocence really end? When you get your first period? Kiss someone? Have a relationship?

A SIMULACRUM

At twelve, my friend told me to hold still as she applied mascara to my eyelashes and my bikini dripped water onto her mother’s tiled bathroom floor. I thought I looked so grown up that I wore it every day for the next five years.

At fourteen, another friend told me she made out with a boy on top of the Ferris wheel and I was sure that was it. All the mascara in the world couldn’t give me the insight I was convinced she suddenly had.

Fifteen was pretending to finally be old and sixteen instilled the foolish conviction in us that we actually were. Midnight drives and ocean swims. Burritos on the boardwalk. High school. Who liked who.

Control was nothing but a fraying rope back then.

And then we met seventeen. Lust, global rupture, heartbreak, loss. Is it any wonder that nearly nothing survived? Coastal drives and harmless crushes slid to the back of my mind. Girlhood was suddenly a cold metal door and I left claw marks all over it just trying to get out.

When the first crack of light came pouring through those scratches, I ran right towards it. Towards the door of that early promise made by the glamorous women of my life who made it all look so lovely.

No one told me that there would be a hallway, or just how long and winding it would be. Walking through it during the pandemic was more akin to being lost in a funhouse. Reality shapeshifted. Things appeared one way, and were really another. I stopped wearing mascara.

REMEMBER THIS

Time speeds up the older that you get. But it’s a gradual, murky process and you don’t realize it all at once. You can’t nail down the exact moment that the clock began to play tricks on you. Adolescence is a room that will only ever get messy. We will only ever try to make it clean.

I am not interested in packing up the past and hiding it in the back of my closet. I do not care to pretend that memories don’t stick out from under my bed like shoes I’ve run out of room for.

I’m in my twenties now. I’ve graduated from college. I’ve moved to New York. I’ve I am light years away from where I was then. I know this. But there is a part of me that is still seventeen and she is still standing all alone in her Doc Martens on the football field, waiting for a goodbye that never came.

I’m spinning, blinking at the walls, tracing my steps in case I never find my way back when I hear the glasses hit the marble.

Gin and tonic and an espresso martini.

“Thank you,” a woman I don’t immediately recognize says with a smile.

I blink and see that I am with her. We’re having drinks. She looks to be about twenty-five and I am not much younger. It’s my friend.

There is a mirror behind the bar and it is not bending. I am not in that long hallway anymore. I’m hanging out with a friend, talking about when she and her boyfriend want to get married.

We can get married?

I knew I had fully left girlhood when such a thing was suddenly so normal. I get vertigo from looking down at the distant world of girlhood I had, at some indistinguishable point, shot far out of.

Girlhood is a gone thing, but I can still trace its dimensions. It’s just one world removed from wherever I am now. I can still hear its music through the weak infrastructure of time. When the city is quiet and I am lying awake, I can still hear her crying in a room I am unable to return to.

Some days I feel the tug of her hand on my sleeve, asking me not to abandon what she lived. Asking me not to clean it up too much. Not to make it prettier than it was. To never say that it was nothing.

If I traced my steps, could I find it? Could I find the boundary and exact moment I had crossed it? I looked down at my feet. I was no longer a kid trying on her mom’s fancy shoes. These were my shoes. My feet bore the blisters. I would walk in them from then on.

Afterimages still flood my vision. Girlhood doesn’t end. It imprints. It burns itself into your retinas so that years later, when you are walking home in a city far away, you will see her silhouette disappearing around a corner.

You will remember her.