love letter #2

once I was fourteen

It was my birthday this week, and I turned 28. But once, I was fourteen.

one of my favourite photos of myself, circa 2009

It’s important that you remember this fact about me. I was very exceptionally fourteen. I was good at being fourteen in all the ways one should be: I was four-eyed, gangly, and young. I was endearingly naïve. I started a new Blogspot every five to seven weeks.

I wanted very badly for there to be a certain mystique about me.

So, I was fourteen, I was naïve and young and gangly. I definitely, surely had a certain mystique that hung about me; a je-ne-sais-quoi, if you will (that’s French for I-don’t-know-what; that’s French for there’s just something about her I can’t get out of my head). I had been ready, for quite some time, to be loved desperately and immediately for all of the undeniable charms I possessed.

I was fourteen in a small town, which meant that the main things to do were walk to Shoppers Drug Mart¹; walk to Tim Hortons; get kicked out of the corner store for loitering; loiter in the local park; be vaguely rude to my mom on the phone; watch movies in my friends’ basements; wonder if all my friends hated me; hang out under a bridge; be afraid of boys; think very hard about how my body looked in tank tops; walk to Pizza Pizza.

I was fourteen at the sunrise of social media and read teen magazines like bible study. I knew 15 Hairstyles To Try This Spring and 6 Signs Your Crush Might Like You Back. I was extremely well-acquainted with the discography of the Black Eyed Peas. I carried around a spiral-bound notebook into which I painstakingly transcribed romantic sonnets and lyrics from the radio. I was positive that the perfect combination of accessories might unlock the secrets of the universe.

At fourteen, twenty-eight meant nothing to me. The only future I could conceive of at fourteen was doing pretty much all the same stuff outlined above, but being paid lavishly for it, all while being a gorgeous thirty-one-year-old who wears sexy trench coats with heels and plum-coloured lipstick (she knows the just-right shade of plum for her complexion). She stomps up and down the hallways of Nondescript Trendy Employer and barks snarky-yet-charming remarks into her flip phone and takes a long lunch to meet her friends for coffee. She retires to her lavish flat in the evening, sinking onto the purple chaise longue with a world-weary sigh, and someone handsome offers her a nearly-full glass of—Sauvignon Noir? Pinot Cabernet? What year? She asks, swirling the wine and taking a whiff. See if you can guess, her partner suggests, pushing aside Proust, Dostoevsky, and Teen Vogue to set a selection of tasteful canapés on the marble coffee table. She does guess, flawlessly. Also, her underwear matches her bra.

I actually do own a pretty sexy trench coat now, so I consider that a win.

Here are some more important facts about me at fourteen:

• I was no longer thirteen, an age which is objectively Hell.

• I had just begun to discover the ways I could make people laugh, and all the other ways I was a real person.

• I had also begun to discover all the things you’re supposed to dislike about yourself.

• I was much too confident.

• I was much too insecure.

• My yearbook Future Ambition was “to change the world” and I was smiling so big in the photo that my homeroom teacher told me I looked “thrilled”

  • I asked him what do you mean??? (I had just learned to be critical of the gums in my smile and had been coaching myself to do it more prettily. I didn’t want to look like I was trying too hard)

  • He said, you just look really happy to be here. I didn’t want to look happy to be here. I wanted to look devastating. I wanted to make people crash their cars.
    

Being fourteen means being filled with rage and having nothing good to be mad about yet. So you absolutely lose it over party invitations and your little sister and the genetically-determined shape of your goddamn fingernails. And you stalk the radius of your town like there’s a wire in your core that’s been pinned taut to the centre of your bedroom.

Being fourteen smells like cold, wet gravel, and warm blood, and lilac trees, and flimsy ruled paper. Like mulch in the springtime and car exhaust and strawberry-mango body mist.

I was so gorgeously fourteen. I did a very good job of it all. I bit my nails and my hair wouldn’t hold a curl and my lips got chapped and I hated running laps. I had bony knees and everything made me cry. I knew the steps to at least one popular choreographed dance routine. All of these things added up to something so important, at one time.

Anyways, that’s all I really had to say: that my birthday has happened a few times now, and one of them was this week, in which I turned twenty-eight. That so far my greatest asset is that I was once fourteen, and pretty fucking good at it.

xo

Emmali

1. I can’t believe revered Canadian retail-pharmacy chain Shoppers Drug Mart has already been name-dropped TWICE in my newsletter. It’s not something I’d like to unpack at this time.