Finally turning double digits on that snowy day in March is a memory that sticks to my skin like sweet honey. At age ten, it was easy for me to believe the idea of knowledge was already tattooed to my body. I already knew my times tables, who my best friends were, and that I, apparently, needed to let my youth disappear through the cracks in my bedroom’s wooden floor. I ignored the effort my mom put into my birthday party that year, because technically, I was too old for themed birthday parties now. I was too selfish to grasp that she secretly feared this would be the last party she could plan for her daughter who’s only birthday wish when blowing out her candles was to grow up.

Now that I was “double digits”, it was time to watch my youth slip through my sepia hair. “Obsessing over boys is mature. Changing my appearance with makeup to look like older girls is grown up. Dressing to fit the stereotype and ignoring the style I actually liked is trendy.” I carried these heavy suitcases with me for years, enclosed in journals for no one to ever read. When I turned fourteen on that dull and rainy day in March, I realized I actually knew nothing at all. I was forced to abandon my middle school which had become my haven from baggage being heaved upon my body. Suddenly, I was thrown into a sweeping wave called high school.

I was never bullied per say. I never cried in the school bathroom, suffocating between the plastic stalls which seemed to get closer with every breath of air. I never wished for myself to be dead. Because really, school was always just a building. Square windows outlined the top of the structure. Burnt brick stone rose in perfectly placed stacks from the ground. I can still illustrate the hallways like the palm of my hand. An exhibit of artistry remains glued inside my mind. Purple and gold stripes outlined the cream colored walls that heard rumors as secrets escaped peoples’ tongues in sibilant whispers, mine included.

I’ve been burdened with anxiety by the words “Forest City Regional High School” since my freshman year ended. But, when I attempt to remember what went wrong, my mind tries to block the tsunami. I can try to put bandaids where my mistakes cut into my own skin, but gauzing wounds will only temporarily stop them from bleeding. I convinced myself that Forest City acted as a metaphor and a mirror for me. I was the joke people echoed, “Forest Shitty.” I couldn't understand friendship at that high school because I never tried to understand myself. I was a girl who dressed in skinny jeans and crop tops because she thought that’s what she had to do to get the validation she desired so intensely. I was starving to fit within the idea of being perfect and aching to be someone else because I hated looking at myself in the school’s bathroom mirrors, which were smothered in inspirational quotes. “You’re beautiful.” “Believe in yourself.” They only made me hate myself more.

I observed how people who had known each other for years and grown up together hated and whispered lies about one another. We pretended that was what we called friendship. Friendship was a term that no one understood, except for Ella, who knew how to be herself. Ella was a girl I admired, but I pretended to be annoyed by her outgoing personality because everyone else did. She was a girl who tried resolutely, but almost ended her life because it was the only solution she could imagine. I struggled to support her with a genuine friendship like I struggled to breathe when she called me at 4 AM to tell me goodbye.

 Craving validation from my so-called friends was the feeling of craving nicotine at eight o’clock in the morning. Seven girls could barely fit into the biggest bathroom stall, but my classmates and I made it work. Enclosed between the plastic, we let the air around us become an aroma of blueberry, pink lemonade, and grape flavored smoke. I loved the feeling of the synthetic dizziness that sucking on a piece of plastic gave me. For just a few seconds, I could forget about how I was faking a smile for eight hours everyday and focus on the numbing sensation that tingled inside my head and fingertips. Nicotine is like a doomed relationship. It gets you hooked to the feeling of being hugged tightly amid honeymoon-phase compliments, but, like most relationships, it never lasts. Once the buzz stops, you’re left surrounded by soundproof glass, screaming to make the addiction stop.

I thought that etching a smile across my cheeks was an act of helping myself when in reality it just drained me more. The way it drained me when I finally decided to tell my “best friend” that I loved to write and she called me retarded. I told myself that was normal. Maybe I was “retarded,” because who in their right mind would ever think that having a common interest was normal? So I rejected the only thing that was still left of me to fit in. I stopped enclosing my thoughts in my journal as much as I had always done, because writing is “retarded”.

It took a year of indulging in smoking weed and seditious episodes to make sense of my freshman year. I craved the feeling of adrenaline. I trespassed to explore rotting buildings that served the danger of soft wood splintering beneath my feet and let my body plummet to a mix of rusty metals, frayed wires, and spray painted walls. When going into stores, I squirrelled new makeup and candy in the nooks of my pockets until we left. I colored my vision with a dazy smoke everyday to keep my world from looking black and white. They say weed isn’t addictive, but when it was my life preserver in a choppy sea, it was for me. It let me forget about things that mattered and focus on how funny it felt to stick my hands below the pond water by my friend's house. I could be entertained for hours doing ridiculous things

I called this finding myself, when, in reality, it just tangled my jewelry more.

I was preoccupied with being a photocopy of every girl in my high school. I itched for boys to pay attention to me. If the girls from Forest City didn’t compliment my outfit that day, I counted on the boys in my science class to plaster me with remarks. They liked to talk about how my butt looked when they thought I wasn’t listening. They enjoyed stealing my pencils and snapping the keys out of my computer. They robbed my phone out of my back pocket as an excuse to let their fingers carve scars across my ass. Jake pulled at the back of my hair and pointed out minuscule details about every outfit I wore. I felt like I couldn’t wear anything without them tearing at my confidence. But I was taught from a young age that when boys are assholes, it means they’re attracted to you.

I let them take advantage of me. I sent them pictures of my body which Noah showed all the boys at a New Years Eve party right before 2020 began. He assured me he was alone and I believed him. He trampled any trust I had left into the tiled school floor like how my parents' faith in me disappeared when they found out I enjoyed marijuana. Trust was a night owl that vanishes when the sun breaches in the morning. As distraught as I was when I found out all the boys had seen me naked, I secretly liked that they were talking about me, even if it wasn’t about how my face looked beautiful or how my personality was kind. They didn’t gossip about who was going to ask me to semi or who has a crush on me. I was easy, a sex toy. I was to be discarded after it got boring. It didn’t bother me. They acknowledged my existence and that was enough for me.

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The only boy who genuinely cared about me was Cory. He took me bowling and let me rest my head on his shoulder. I met his family and he met mine. He asked me to be his girlfriend by making me a handmade poster. We slow-danced to country music even though I hate cheesy country songs. I left him by reading a breakup letter over facetime wherein I told him he was “too clingy”. By just one look he could make me glow, but when the popular boys in my science class made fun of me for loving him, I had to break up with him a few weeks later.

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I complained to my parents about how my friends used the word gay as an insult, but I developed the habit of saying it, too. “This homework assignment is so gay.” If only my classmates knew about the girl I loved in eighth grade and kissed in the field while the sun let the last day of middle school come to an end. I cupped her face and counted the freckles that scattered across her skin. I picked flowers and placed them flawlessly in her sunset-colored hair. I held her hand tightly within mine wherever we went. If only they knew how I told her it wouldn’t work a week later because I was going to Forest City at the end of the summer and I had to be straight. It was naive of me to think that loving both boys and girls was like a light switch I could turn on and off whenever I wanted. The school’s walls and I were the only ones who understood how to keep secrets that pounded against the inside of my head, making me feel psychotic.

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When I turned sixteen on a bleak snowy day in March, I barricaded my head with cement from any memories of Forest City Regional High School. I spent my birthday with the friends I made in middle school. My mom and I planned a fairy and frog themed party together. It was the first themed birthday I had since I was ten. The girl I was in love with the summer before high school made me a cake with miniature handmade frogs scattered on the icing. But, putting bandaids over open wounds is only a temporary fix, and simply barricading my brain from my mistakes will never doctor them. I spent most of 2021 imprisoned beneath floral sheets, wondering why I felt like I was being swept under agitated waves and incapable of surfacing above the water. It took me months to be able to outline in my head that maybe the addiction to being anyone but myself was the reason I couldn’t breathe.

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I look at my old self in the mirror. I saw a burnt brick building with square windows that outline the top of the structure. Walls were the only thing that kept my secrets safe, and those same walls suffocated me with lies I told myself. You weren’t bullied. You don’t like to write. You hate to stand out from the crowd. Ella wasn’t amusing; she was irritating. You loved your face feeling numb from the nicotine you inhaled. You loved how you could spend hours being high staring at the ceiling. You loved the way boys used you. And you hated the way Cory didn’t. And you’re not gay. You’re not gay. You’re straight.

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Staring at the mirror doesn’t feel like drowning anymore, because, really, it’s just a building. It’s not a mirror, but an old, brick building. When I look in the mirror, I see a reflection of a woman who was able to untangle the necklaces that strangled her. She is a woman who isn’t ashamed to wrap her skin with clothes that fit her personality, or embarrassed to love women with freckles and sunset-colored hair. She isn’t someone who needs weed or nicotine to see the world as a colorful place, or someone who hurts people because being popular and receiving attention from boys is the only priority. I’m a woman who sees my unclouded reflection in still waters.

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