At Eighteen

When I was nine years old, my biggest wish in life was to be twelve. Indeed, twelve was a good year. Thirteen marked the beginning of my foray into the world of dating (during that time dating was when a boy you liked asked you to “go out with him” at the local shopping mall only to wither under your sadistic attempts to hide from him in the school hallways). Fourteen was a year full of blind faith and false promise, a.k.a. high school. Looking back I feel I should have known better than to believe that there was anything remotely resplendent about the gray, pyramid shaped roofs and pretentious royal blue lettering marking each department of the school. Fifteen and sixteen were a blur of heartbreak and obsession, **** was all I wanted and I nearly shredded my internal organs pining after what I believed would be the most intense and prolific love affair in the history of high school relationships. Sixteen was also the year I was sleeping on my aunt’s floor, eating peanut butter and pretzel sandwiches and wishing I was Bella Swan. At seventeen I developed a taste for whiskey, snuck in snippets through cracked closet doors. It was also during that time that I gave up any hope for a life that didn’t end with fourteen studio albums and 30 plus years of sold out touring. I wrote songs, read East of Eden three times, and felt both genuinely happy and completely alone. I spoke the truth to a void, because he was a good listener. I bought denim jackets and a poster of a rocket ship, and realized that an obsessive need to fill my room with material possessions acquired at various secondhand shops coursed madly through my veins. Now I’m living through eighteen. It’s only been a month and yet it has filled me with such sorrow and confusion. The world is asking me to be the “vs.” between growing up and staying young. I’ve never been one for conflict, and now each morning I’m faced with a boiling hot feud between two separate and arbitrary sides of myself. Eighteen is the year they thrust you into the real world with a handful of “I told you so’s” ,“go get ‘em tiger’s”, and “I believe in you’s”. Eighteen is the year they expect you to make your own decisions and not fuck them up. But at eighteen, all I want to do is sing in my closet and eat peanut butter cookies. At eighteen I can’t stand to look at photos of myself prior to 2003. At eighteen I find myself a victim of somniphobia, sifting through and cataloguing my short life in mental file cabinets. Alphabetical order. Beginning to end. Is this the beginning, or the end?

Copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011