Sixteen and Two Months

By Kriya Shah

In about two months from now, her bangs will have grown out and her highlights will have faded.

She will read her diary entries from the past year with a new sense of wisdom and a mocking laugh at the little things she used to worry about. She will tear up a little at the frustration, the hopelessness and the helplessness she felt when old friendships died, but knowingly smile about the new ones her younger self would briefly reference, and about her wish that these new relationships would last. They will. She will be sixteen and two months old and she will be confident.

She will feel grateful for the healthy weight her body has gained back after stress and tears and skipping meals, and she will vow to never fret about such things ever again, though she knows it’s a promise made to console herself. All she can hope for is that as the years go on, she will foster more love, so much so that it eclipses every insecurity that comes rushing back when she looks in the mirror. And then she will think back to the December of her sixteenth birthday, and remind herself that she made it through. She made it through.

~+*+~

December is always the hardest. It has the most beautiful moments, the silvery snowflakes, the twinkling lights, the sweetness of hot cocoa after an impromptu run to Target because oh, we were bored. But it has its chaos, beautiful chaos, but chaos nonetheless. It seems that every day is a new celebration, always someone’s anniversary or birthday falling like the snowflakes we haven’t seen in December for years. Her own nuclear family, for all its nonconformity, celebrates two milestones this month. Holiday shopping and seeing family you act strange around and all the planning, oh, the planning. So many clicks and risks you take, so much time you invest, just to put in for a few hours of reward, and many more hours of Amazon returns. On top of that, you even have to feel grateful! She would know. One of those fateful, effort-sucking family celebrations is her own, sweet birthday.

Sixteen is an odd number. It is even, technically speaking, but you have to wonder why everything revolves around being sixteen, and why it’s been marketed as being “sweet.” 15 has left her with a bitter taste in her mouth in response to everything that involves emotion; does that just go away when you turn a year older? Bittersweet 16. She cynically enjoys that title a lot more. Where is my perfect love story? Where is my cherry-red Maserati? What path did I take to turn out like Cady instead of Regina (obviously, her fate was decided for her when she picked up the first Harry Potter book in the third grade, but let her muse a little more)? The only thing she’s gotten as she inches closer to sixteen is this overwhelming feeling that she’s growing too fast, or going too slowly, or everyone else around her seems to be doing great things and she is stuck on a calculus problem, only messing up the arithmetic. When did her little brother get as tall as her? How did her friend think of that idea? When did she start asking so many rhetorical and random questions to herself?

Her sixteen-and-two-months self will have the answer to all of these questions. She will have a driver's permit and a self-sufficient soul. She will have friends who love her, and a little unresolved baggage from those who don’t, but she will process it and come out of the other side better for it. She won’t mess up the arithmetic any more, and she will go on to learn new concepts, new ways of learning, of behaving, of expressing. Of feeling. If she tells herself sixteen times that this year will be sweet, it will be, because somehow, she now attracts this positive energy that she lacked at fifteen. At sixteen-and-two-months, she will be happier, and that is what helps her get through these excruciating last days of being fifteen; the fact that she makes it through. She will make it through.

Kriya Shah is a sophomore at North Penn who worries too much about the day her little brother passes her height.