All you can do is walk

I walk a path, and perhaps you do too.

On this path, I am blindfolded, but I am not alone.

I am accompanied by the voice of an angel or perhaps by the sneering of a devil- this, among other things, I cannot decide.

As I walk, I know there is a question I must ask, things I must know.

But how to get the answer to a question I cannot form?

Why do I wander off each day, if I do not know where I am headed?

I am filled with the desire to have the answer at once. It urges me to walk on, hurried and stumbling down the rough terrain with eyes covered and feet bare.

The thought occurs to me, or perhaps it is whispered in my ear by the devilish thing that follows me closer and closer. Have I decided then, that it is in fact a trickster that accompanies me?

“What if each day you go further from where you are supposed to be headed?” It asks smugly.

“But where is that exactly?” its voice shifts into a kinder tone, as if it knows it cannot let me decide.

Perhaps it wants me to find the answer somewhere along this rough path. Or it wishes to trick me into stillness.

No matter. It plants a seed that I so willingly foster until its roots wrap all around and within me.

Have I missed a train I was supposed to catch? Has someone called my name from too far away? Are the things I want passing me by? Do they walk opposite to me, silently waving me "so long"?

“But what things do you want?” it asks, and I do not know if it means to comfort me.

Have I ever known the answer to that?

Dread curls itself in the pit of my stomach like a cat on lap.

How can I be sure that if I realize I made a mistake and wish to turn back, the path won’t disappear and leave me with no choice but to keep walking on forever?

Is there a moment in time when your gut grumbles in satisfaction, when you feel calm and see clearly where you are headed? Do you ever get to take the blindfold off and breathe a sigh of relief, “Ah…I chose right after all.”

Or, will there always be this uneasiness of not knowing, a slight cool breeze that passes by as you walk to remind you to doubt where you are going– that you may never really know what it is to find the place you are looking for.

“The choice is yours,” it says, but I hear my own voice speaking back at me.

I realize the question I must ask, and yet I don’t have anyone to tell me the answer.

I ask anyway.

Every girls first time

She never knows when it will be her turn, but she expects that sooner or later, it will come. The haunting chills that freeze her in place are a warning sign. When she knows it’s happening, there’s the exhilarating feeling that she wasn’t crazy all along! It was about time; she knew it would happen eventually. It had already happened to all her friends; she was just a late bloomer, it seemed. They had described the feeling, the hints leading up to it, how they felt, what the room looked like, what they were wearing- they could tell her every detail. Some couldn’t, of course, but she knew she would try her best to take in the moment, to focus on anything and everything. She would be prepared; who wouldn't be, right? Of course, she didn’t always know, but she heard whispered stories among the other women. Her grandmother sipped tea with her friends as she played at her feet, thinking she was too focused on her puzzles to pay attention to their conversation. Her grandmother wasn’t completely wrong, although she didn’t understand the words they used, she understood the mood that enveloped the room because it flowed through her and never truly left. It was serious, like a secret that had to be kept in her grandmother’s finest china, tucked away in the glass cupboard in plain sight but always ignored. It felt important, a topic only grown-ups could talk about, only properly addressed on cold afternoons that called for tea and biscuits. She carried it like a piece of a puzzle that was nowhere near being complete. So she tucked it in the pocket of her onesie, and carried it with her, feeling its outline and weight once in a while. She may have forgotten a few times, but that’s only because by then, it had already become a part of her. It's easy to forget the things that make us who we are if we are not reminded of them. That is, until we are forced to understand why they were there all along.

She forgets it is there completely until she hears a girl from her class speak in the same tone her grandma used with her friends. The words the girl used to describe it were less concise. She repeated herself breathlessly, running through her sentences, which were only made harder to understand through her whimpering sobs. She understood this girl had been clued in, which surprised her because she had previously thought that only adults, like her grandma, would be allowed to carry the bigger pieces of the puzzle. This was a big discovery: if the girl in her classroom was clued in so early on, then maybe she would be too! Maybe she wouldn’t have to wait until she got her braces off, or until she was allowed to walk around the mall without holding her mom’s hand to be part of this. Although the girl handled it without the hard faces she remembered her grandma and her friends wearing, she understood that it had the same weight to it. Like how the sun pulls all of the planets in the solar system towards it, this experience, too, seemed to be pulling her in, as though she, too, belonged to this solar system of feminine secrecy, although farther away than her grandma and the girl in her class. If they were Mars, she was still Neptune. She had just learned about the solar system and felt very proud to have made the connection. The puzzle piece in the pocket of her purple overalls felt heavier than before.

She heard whispers of it at summer camp. She had been dealing with the non-stop, relentless complaining of teen girls in the summer heat, while she, too, was miserable and cursed herself for accepting this stupid summer job in the stupid middle of nowhere with these stupid cabins with broken AC. She had been fighting with the bed sheets for some semblance of coolness, irritated by the voices she’d been listening to for over a week now, when the piece she’d forgotten about since middle school seemed to poke at her from the pocket in her sleeping shorts. Not even the dewy heat of mid-July got in the way of these shared secrets. In a room full of eager ears, all complaining stopped as everyone held their breaths to listen to every word. One of the girls, a small freshman with frizzy waves and rounded brown eyes, sat holding the thin pillow against her chest. There were wet spots on it, merging and seeping into the fabric. More girls sat along her bed, squeezing her shoulders in reassurance, looking down at their feet, or playing with the worn-out tears in the linens. They looked like they could be hung in the Louvre, with their bodies merging into each other in the dimly lit room, huddled so close together that there was no telling them apart. This sisterhood, this feeling of somberness while the frizzy-haired girl spoke, was a softer, more fragile version of a distant memory of a group of ladies using big words she didn’t understand, nodding their heads with straight lips and tired eyes while dipping biscuits in their tea. Here, the girls were anything but slow at letting their tears flow out. It was a movement of its own, tracing their faces and landing on their laps, their palms, sometimes pushed out by a thick bead of sweat. She watches them in awe, listening to the whispers become muffled by teary sniffs, sometimes disguised by fake coughs. The curly-headed girl was the figurehead of this Renaissance painting; she held the others close, her head held high looking over her sisterhood, a crying, confused, and wounded group of girls who didn’t quite understand the pain that had been shared with them, but fiercely resented it. Her pocket felt the heaviest it ever had; the heat she felt coming from it was different from the sticky heat emanating from the love around the girls; this was a scorching, threatening blaze. She was starting to connect the pieces, to be pulled closer to the sun, but now she knew that was no longer a destiny to fulfill, it was a sentence to carry out. The puzzle piece branded itself onto her skin, marking her forever.

She’s feeling the bass in her headphones boom; it’s an old song she doesn’t recognize, but something about the melody leaves her hooked, so she gives it a chance before skipping to her favorite album. She's picking at the dead skin on her fingernails; it’s been a rough winter, and she feels her whole body dry and crack against the cold air. It helps that she snagged a window seat right by the vents; it’s warm and the song playing has a calming tune. She can see three other people on this cart, all four of them sitting at opposite sides, silently agreeing to be left undisturbed. The closest person is sitting two rows of seats ahead of her, holding onto a fully loaded grocery cart. Her head rests against the wall behind her, barely reaching the advertising poster against fare evasion. She wonders where the woman is coming from so early in the morning, and what grocery stores are open before 7 a.m. The bag holding rice crackers, dry seaweed, and squid jerky reminds her that she had to skip breakfast to make it to work on time, so she sips on her coffee and ignores the rumbling in her stomach. Further down the cart, someone sat with their back towards her; all she could see was an orange beanie and black headphones sitting on their head, and swaying their head to what she guessed was the song playing in their ears. The last person sat in the far back, reading a small paperback, shaded by the hood covering their face. She knows her stop is far, so she closes her eyes and leans her head against the window. There is a sacrilegious rhythm to the bumping of the train syncing with the booming in her headphones, as her head gently taps the glass. The early morning hours of her commute are something of a ritual: tiring and dreaded while she’s still in bed, but quite nice when it’s just her in a nearly empty cart, in the chilly winter air, bundled up and holding a coffee. The comfort of these slow moments helps her fall into a light sleep, just a quick nap until they call out her stop. She closes her eyes while facing the lady with her grocery cart, as she too seems to be resting her eyes. A distant feeling makes its way around her body, waking her senses with a familiar intensity. It burns its way into the pocket of her ripped jeans, expanding itself to the rest of her body and burning itself into her chest. It wakes her up to the same scene she closed her eyes to, except for one added figure, whose intense stare confuses her. She looks around, and the lady with the shopping bag is gone; in her place is a tall man with his hands in his pockets, bouncing his leg without breaking eye contact with her. This is strange; something about it feels wrong; the burning in her chest gets more intense, and she remembers faces she hasn’t seen since her summer job in high school. A group of girls huddled on a single bed, embracing each other in the summer heat, snot, sweat, and tears running down their young faces. Nothing about it seemed comforting now; she only remembers the feelings of desperation, fear, and helplessness. She grips her coffee so hard it starts to drip onto her lap, but she can’t feel it burning her skin, because she’s already scorching; she could catch fire and it wouldn’t feel as torturous as this. The man has a grin on his face; he looks around to the other people on the train, both of which don’t realize what is happening. One with their back turned, and the other’s eyes covered by a jacket hood. The man comes to sit beside her, in a train full of empty seats, and she knows his intent. The music in her ears is a song she danced to with her friends at a New Year's eve party; it reminds her of card games and tipsy laughter too loud to be contained in that small downtown apartment. She wishes they were here; she wishes she wasn’t alone, or that she could speak, or move at all. He is staring at her pants, moving his hand down her thigh, gripping it as he moves lower. He smells of cologne, and she notices a wedding ring on that hand. His hand rubs against her pocket and she remembers the girls again; she remembers their anger, she remembers clenching her teeth until her head hurt, hot tears pooling at her eyes, her throat so tight she couldn’t breathe without gasping for air. He smiles at her, mouthing something she can’t hear over the song she danced to with her friends. She is screaming inside her head; the coffee cup is indented, but it still holds the hot coffee she wanted to enjoy on her commute today. No switch flips to make her hurl the scorching cup at the man; she doesn’t fully realize she could have done this until much later on. Not an inch of her body moves until he gets up, winks at her, and with one last squeeze in between her thighs, gets up and walks off the train. No one had seen what happened; they were still focused on their music, on their book, in a state of peace and safety she would never feel again.

She pushes her daughter's stroller in the park; the summer breeze won’t get her sick because she’s blocked her seat with a thin cover. She’ll remove it when the baby wakes up so she can see the green of the trees, the dogs wagging their tails as they pass by on their walks, and the older children riding their bikes on the gravel road. Watching her daughter's face as she takes in the world around her makes her heart beat a little harder, and she wants to show her all of the other things that make the world a beautiful place. She can’t wait until her daughter is old enough to sing her favorite songs with her, to taste cold chocolate ice cream while they sit at the beach making sand castles, getting home, and smelling the sunscreen on both of their skins. As she pushes her stroller, someone smelling of cologne passes them. The world around her is sucked into a blackhole, the warmth of the summer afternoon frozen over .

She’s twenty years old again, sitting in the subway with coffee stains on her jeans, missing her stop, and having to wait for her friends to come pick her up at a random station. Her phone is ringing as her boss angrily leaves voicemails asking where she is. She’d burst into tears, shaking and barely able to see anything ahead of her. Nothing seemed real until she heard her friends shouting her name down the street, running towards her, and crashing into her to hold her with all of their strength. She cried on that random street outside of a subway station she would avoid for the rest of her life. Her friends helped her into a car, and took her home, where she stayed until the trees outside were fully bloomed. The first time she walked outside was too much to do alone; the noise of the cars hurt her ears and made her vision blurry. Her limbs shook as people bumped into her in the busy streets. She called her friends to take her back home because she couldn’t remember where she was. Her sister made her dinner that night, washed her with warm water in the bathtub, and while she slept, cleaned her apartment. She could barely recognize it without the boxes of take-out and garbage covering the floor. Her once spotless home was now a layer of filth between her and the world outside. It was a while until she could speak about what happened, and an even longer time until she could step foot in a subway again, or anywhere with crowds, or smell any kind of perfume without it sending her spiraling and feeling a fire inside of her. She realized the piece of the puzzle she carried with her had dissipated; she was now fully aware of the secrets whispered over tea, of why the tears flowed out of the girl in her class, and of the emotions in that one summer inside of a cabin full of teenage girls. They all knew, and now she did too.

She grips her daughter's hand, feeling her daughter trying to squirm her fingers from under hers. She’s walking her to the bus stop for the first time, controlling her breathing without pushing back tears that no longer spill out of her. She’s taught her daughter all she could; she’s driven her everywhere she has ever needed to go- soccer practices, school drop-offs, birthday parties, the mall, the corner store, everywhere. But her daughter’s older now, not so eager to have her mom hold her hand in public or be driven to her first date. She knows to be aware of her surroundings, to never close her eyes with others around, always be able to hear things around her, to hold her keys in between her fingers, and to know where she will run if anyone tries to attack her. She knows all of this; she’s heard it a million times growing up, along with how to best incapacitate an attacker, to scream "fire" to get people’s attentions, to never under any circumstances walk or let any of her friends walk alone in unknown places and never feel comfortable enough anywhere to let her guard down. Her daughter thinks of her mother as paranoid, and she hopes with everything in her that her daughter always thinks that, that she will never have to understand her fears, she will never have to carry around a piece of a puzzle that she will one day be part of. She lets go of her daughter's hand as she steps on the bus; she watches her pay her fare, as the doors close she sees her daughter find a spot to sit; she waves her goodbye with a smile on her face that says, “See! I'm fine, there’s nothing to worry about!”

She walks back home, her chest a drumbeat of anxiety. Her daughter’s face shines brightly in her thoughts, but she can't shake the fear. The piece of the puzzle she once carried has slipped from her own pocket and found a new home in her daughter's. Has its weight already begun to settle, a silent truth she failed to notice? A small part of the secret may already be hers, a faint memory of a conversation over tea and biscuits.