j0emama-

For Nicole On Her 19th Birthday

You are nineteen. You are beginning the finale of your teen years, inhaling the last breath of adolescence, and reaching out to touch the softening shadows of your childhood. Some may tell you to make a thousand mistakes that are only acceptable for nineteen years under the guise of being young and supposedly naïve. I won’t, because to do that would discredit all the intelligence, composure, and grace you have accumulated in nineteen years. It would also suppose your time for existential wandering ends with your teenage years.

In your nineteen years you have awoken each day, brushed your curls, and welcomed with every second new emotion that has affected, shaped, and transformed you. You have lived and not stopped living, letting in every pigment of light your soft brown eyes can hold. You have allowed all 27 million degrees of the sun to beat upon your face and you refuse to burn up.

In nineteen years you may think you have discovered all that is sensational in the world. You’ve experienced many ‘firsts’ and ‘rites of passages,’ from losing a baby tooth to losing your wisdom teeth, from creating your first dance move by kicking in rhythm to hearing the rhythm of a boy’s heart as you shared your first slow dance. It is okay if there comes a time when satin ribbons are no longer exciting to touch, a firework does not startle you into reverie, and gilded ornaments on a Christmas tree no longer makes your eyes go wide.  You have already felt and learned so much that it seems there is nothing left worthy for you to discover. Luckily that is okay because it is untrue. Life really is ceaseless and sublime.

Be excited about getting older and experiencing more. Remember that there are more countries in the world than years in a life, giving you plenty of places to fill your days exploring. Outline every ocean, lake, and river you want to visit on a map and dive into every one of them so they transform from paper to liquid. Each time you notice a new bird, its feathers more vibrant and its poise more striking than you have ever seen before, smile at the notion that such beauty simply soars about our world.

Think about every hand you have shaken, every gaze you have held, and every laugh line you helped crease; though you may think otherwise, the number of each is innumerable. Know that even on days when your shoes feel too heavy to dance, with every breath you take your heart dances on. Each day you wake up and allow your heart to dance on, giving my heart and so many others all the more reason to do so as well. Let’s dance forever, even when are legs go brittle and we’re no longer teens.

Happy birthday and happy life.

Love,

so I was walking back from work around nineish and my neighbor/seminar classmate is in the hallway talking to his girlfriend. he sees me and he’s like “hey!! hey classmate whose name I don’t know” so I turned around and was like “it’s Hayley.”

and he apologized for not knowing (I didn’t know his name either so I wasn’t mad) and asked if I’d started my first paper for seminar. he asked me what it was on so I told him and he was like “I’m so stuck I have no idea what to do,” so clearly the natural response for my stupid ass to make is to offer him help – I told him to knock on our door and ask for me if he needed help.

maybe I did this because I was still in tutor mode from work. maybe I did it because no one takes those offers up anyway, right?

wrong! a half an hour later, as I’m getting ready to shower, he knocks for the door and asks for me, and all my roommates don’t believe him bc he’s this dude bro who clearly works out and is wearing a johnny cash tshirt. like how fake deep is that. i would never associate with a dude bro

so he invites me back to his place and as I’m walking there I’m like “this could very possibly be a bad idea,” but I go anyway bc I’m a dumbass with no sense of self preservation.

he lets me into his apartment and I’m immediately hit with the bro-ness of it all: a sports illustrated poster on the wall, protein powder EVERYWHERE, posters of beer, snap backs, flasks, and a guitar because of course there is.

his room is no better, and alarm bells are just fucking going off and I’m trying to think of a quick exit. then he tries to close his damn door to his own room and I’m like “hold up that stays open” and he was like “oh yeah I’m sorry I didn’t think about that,” which was….considerate.

two hours, two cigarette breaks later, one opening paragraph later, and one of his roommates trying to hit on me later, he starts talking about intersectionality and my mind goes ?????????????? and we legit talked about rape culture and trump and how fucked we all are. eventually we started talking about the law and feminism so then I tell him I’m gay and his immediate response is “do you get those stupid microagressions from guys who say they can turn you straight?” and it took me a minute to respond bc the fact he even knew that word was so bizarre it was like worlds colliding.

he then tells me he thinks his little sister might be gay because he thinks she told him while he was drunk one night but he couldn’t remember so he asks for advice because he doesn’t want to upset her because, in his words, “I’m not gay so you know I don’t understand it like you do.”

then, because the night of course could get weirder, he tells me he writes poetry but doesn’t tell anyone because he’ll get shit for it bc he’s supposed to be a “tough guy” and masculine and shit and I just feel Jesus sending me a message through this kid that I shouldn’t judge all dude bros by the bro-ness of their looks but I also wanna stay sexy and not get murdered so I’m gonna keep doing that. sorry jesus.

finally I left because I was tired and also I had to wash the smell of bad cologne off of me but guys this was an experience please believe me. i was standing in the shower before just letting the water wash over me as the whole two hour ordeal played over in my head because we laughed, we talked. he told me something about himself no one else knows, we exchanged political ideas and fist bumps. we bonded over the stress of a seminar paper and now we are forever changed by this event.

“Don’t judge yourself by what others did to you.” 

“During my second month of nursing school, our professor gave us a pop quiz. I was a conscientious student and had breezed through the questions, until I read the last one: “What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?” Surely this was some kind of joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times. She was tall, dark-haired and in her 50s, but how would I know her name? I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Before class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our quiz grade. “Absolutely,” said the professor. “In your careers you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say ‘Hello’.”