Two by Nola Nelson

 

Sixteen 

Rebekah is sixteen, she has outgrown playdates and baby teeth but has ingrown hang nails and that lightheaded feeling you get right in between tipsy and drunk. She wears gold hoops and a belt bag and she feels incredibly old. It is the kind of old that is a secret. Her age is a garden you enter and don’t tell your parents about till you are all well past thirty. She realizes almost every day at ten oh five that she has free will. She is shocked by this, by the ability to buy mint chip ice cream and eat the whole pint in a blazing hot car seat and never tell a soul. Sixteen comes before seventeen which is the longing to be old enough that you don’t have to hide it. Rebekah loves her secret until its overwhelming dread faces her. She has yet to study for the ACT, she knows she should but nothing in her body can understand the future regret enough to actually do it. Rebekah also desperately wants curly hair, not a perm but the real thing. At night she’ll scrunch her hair with this aloe vera-scented gel that she stole from her sister’s side of the bathroom. Though she’d never admit it, because that’s embarrassing, she thinks it would match her wild carefree personality that she desperately tries to convince everyone she has. Rebekah is a lot like me.

 

 

How Much Girlhood Is Left In You?

To be a woman is to be

apologetically vain. Every frail year

I have lived sits inside the next,

A replica of the rings on trees in the redwoods,

My future is an exoskeleton growing over adolescence,

becoming repentant and ashamed of my voice.

But somewhere I am eight years old

and nothing bad has happened yet.

Somewhere I am still a girl lying on an Ikea carpet

in my bedroom inviting summer air through my humid window

pane, To be a woman is to know how to ask

for someone to take their hand off your knee

But somewhere my dad is still putting pink calamine

on my ant bites,

To be a woman is to pull out strands from a messy bun

I am eight my ponytails are still pulled by my mother

too tight too soon,

they leave a skeleton of themselves on my scalp

Somewhere I have not yet learned of my mother’s miscarriage

and that the baby was supposed to be named Greta,

My shorts have never been measured against my fingertips

And I have not yet appreciated peace

 

Right here in this version of my skin,

my girlhood can still shine through my freckles, my flesh

But my fifteenth shell has suffocated many pieces of her,

I’ve grown kisses on her lips, bandaged her scars with new skin

I talk to her sometimes, I tell her about the sky nowadays and how well

our Mom is doing.

I whisper how much I love the eyes she gave me

and that I promise to take care of her smile

My girlhood talks back

She reminds me that I am speaking to that eight-year-old

when I look in the mirror

I am thinking about that eight-year-old

when I count the calories in

mint mouthwash and inches of my wrist.

I have decided it is nice to just be a ring of my tree,

a moment in my life, A walk downtown, a kiss on the cheek

In this version of myself, I have learned to appreciate peace,

This stillness is new and I will love it until it passes

I know there will always be a fifteen-year-old inside of me

Scared of bugs and being alone, seizures and spoiled milk,

She will grow over her years like ivy up an abandoned brick wall

One day she will see the Eiffel Tower, New York at night, the love of her life,

 

but the biggest thing she will see is her reflection,

looking at all of the people she has been and

telling them they never had to worry so much

about being beautiful or appealing.

Telling them that there is a moment of acceptance,

when their leaves turn orange

and their childhood sap turns sour when they still know

that we are still strong enough to survive the winter.

 

 

Nola Nelson is a sixteen year old high school junior studying creative writing in Houston Texas. Her writing influences include Wendy Cope, Audre Lorde, and Sylvia Plath. Nola primarily writes prose, screenplays, and poetry. She finds immense joy in the poetic moments of everyday life and the smell of citrus.