Adulthood

It is not something that you’d ever dreamt of attaining,

when your life was an oil-pastel painting, with a few crayons

and sky-scraping dreams carelessly scattered, strangely watched over by

the chaotic combination of R. L. Stein and Enid Blyton. No, even

when the rush of hormones caused a vivid, painful alteration to the harlequin scenery and

to those scattered jigsaw pieces, you did not want to grow up.

 

It did not slap you in the face- the stinging pain lasted longer than that. Instead,

it devoured your being, your soul, and parts of you that had no identity- its presence

an epidemic creeping into your flesh, celebrating the grand descent

in every scandalous step. No, adulthood did not arrive with the blood between your thighs

or the prickly hair along your jaw. You knew it was here- when you saw a monster on the other side

of the mocking glass, the same wraith who had once lived under your bed.

 

You knew it was here, when you became the poetry that your mother read to you

before sleep, poetry you wrote on your dark, dilapidated days-the words tasting

sweet-sour-bitter in your poisonous tongue- or, when you cursed the sun

for smearing your face, ruthlessly divulging your vulnerably bare limbs

and that kaleidoscopic identity, or when you lose yourself in an attempt to find yourself

in an illicit affair with darkness, stranded in a strange, masked city.

 

In the hungry waters that failed to wash away the sins of your god- no, there was a pair,

when you swallow the pungency of filth in joy, or joy in filth, or both, and

your love for this new sin reflects in the precarious surface,

adulthood smiles an affordable smile, while those crayons paint monochrome

and you embrace earthly dreams and lonely pillows, smiling, then dreading-

you are not the only one.

[Published in Moledro Magazine (Issue 4)]