Acting My Age

I love to play a role. Today I am channelling Effy from Skins. I am every inch the forlorn teenage miscreant. Wearing an extra long black capped sleeve tee, with the tiniest shorts underneath, which make it look like I’m not wearing any shorts at all. It’s barely legal. My many chained necklace with rosary beads, my hair darkened and messed and scrunched up with bobby pins, like after wild sex. A ton of mascara and dark blue cat-eye eyeliner. I pout with wet pale pink lips. Effy meets Russell Brand meets Amanda. I have a boldness that makes women scowl at me in bathroom mirrors. I have an arse that makes people walk three paces slower. I have legs that make grown men ask whether I’ve been a naughty girl when I sit outside classrooms. Everybody wants me and nobody wants me. I want them to look. I’m so wanton I could lay myself across your lap. I’m not a nice person when I’m not getting any. Men like to tell women that they’re tense because they need a good screw, and women hate them for it. But I wouldn’t argue the point. I saw a girl with an arse in a skirt and legs that literally made my jaw drop, and my breath leave me in a huff. Tanned and tall and fit she was. I wanted to lick her legs and do things to her even a blog as frank as this one should not relate. There’s a side to me, a masculine and raw side that thinks these thoughts, and sometimes it likes to purposely remind me of its presence. My libido has always been an honest assessment of my age.

There is something so unchanging about the teenage experience. Yet there is something about the carriage of the gangly boy on the small wheeled bike with the tilted back seat, which seems so distinctive to me. So much of a snapshot of our generation. The skank on the phone to her mother protesting that the train really was delayed and that she wasn’t doing anything untoward after school. The train was seriously delayed. She was right. Her mother didn’t believe her. I felt so sorry for the poor girl. She went from sighing apology to regretful angst in a second. I felt like politely asking for her phone and talking to her mother myself. In my best most pleasant British accent I would say: “Hi, honey, would it perhaps help if I told your mother the train was late?” “Hi, my name is Anika, I’m here on the train platform with your daughter... is it Stephanie? I’m here with Stephanie and I would just like to assure you that the train was indeed late, and that you have a wonderful but sadly misunderstood daughter. Good day to you madam.” I don’t know why I was so taken with the idea. Perhaps because I have been her. Perhaps because I felt so strongly what she needed and may never find. Someone to come to her rescue.

The pair beside me, desperately trying to flirt with one another. I remember that heat, that barrenness, and bareness of being a teenager making advances on another teenager. It was dry, foreign, biting, and uncertain. The hate and the love and the sting all those new feelings had; the games and the anxiety and thinking in circles over nothing. It’s such a strong ungraspable nostalgia, but it’s so hard to sift out anything affecting. It’s important and unique. I want to remember that stuff. It’s been years. I can’t even tell you if I ever actually felt it. But what is this conception that I have conjured up upon seeing these two? Is that experience? Is it empathy? I don’t think I ever lived their moment. To take a classic from United States Of Tara, after a kiss and their shy admission of wanting to do it again I’m not the kind to shrug and giggle and say ‘cool’.
I’m the kind to say in a low voice ‘Me too, only next time I want to be on top.’ I’ve always been too aware, too forward. I’ve never been in a moment like the one dredged up by these two shy teenagers. And with the perspective I’ve acquired now, I’ll never be able to feel that again. I disliked it, and I wanted to get away from it. It was immature and pointless and downright stressful. But I can’t help but feel like I cheated myself of something, having never felt that. I miss the chase. I miss not knowing things. I miss being as much of an idiot as the next person.

What happened to my teenage years? I look upon these people and know that I could still be a part of that. I was meant to only be in year 12 this year. I was meant to be part of all those photos that my friends are putting up on Facebook. Not one of them invited me to their graduation. What happened to my post-high school summer? THAT is a question that needs answering. That summer was dead to me. Everybody went travelling. Every single person in my writing class has been overseas, all 24 of them, me excluded. I can just imagine the things my cohort are getting up to these holidays. My partner spent weeks camping on a beach and capsizing a boat by the sounds of it after he graduated. Those holidays have 5 events to me. And they keep slipping away from me and changing. Getting my results. Going to the presentation night. Getting into uni. Blogging. Stressing about accommodation.

Fuck it. I don’t care what you think. I feel I’m getting old. And it hurts. I’m already 18, I’ve already graduated. This is the end of my last chance to do crazy teenage things. Fucking hell. I’m meant to be taking drugs! Do I want to take drugs? I’m meant to be shagging myself stupid with a million partners! Do I want to be shagging myself stupid with a million partners? I’m meant to be throwing it all away and fucking off somewhere far away! Do I want to throw it all away and fuck off somewhere far away? The truth is that I have it all in me. I have all these teenage desires but I refuse to act on them. There’s a part of me lusting to get out of my mind on illicit substances, a part of me longing to jump anything with a nice arse, and a part of me wanting to hitchhike out of here, leave the country even. But it is so subdued. Like the remnants of a forgotten instinct. Compelling, from nowhere, but very feeble. It should be raging in me right now. Somehow I missed out. People on Facebook fill out anonymous quizzes on me and answer that I am no fun to be around. It hurts. I remember telling people fun was not in my vocabulary. I remember writing on the blog that I made a typo of ‘fun’ because the concept was so foreign to me I didn’t even know how to spell it. Where did this come from? Did I somehow conceive long ago that I had to be boring in order to be older? In order to be taken seriously? Am I even wrong about that?
We stop doing silly fun things because we grow bitter, safe and soft. And because of my age in years I feel I should compel myself into doing those things, but I’ve already grow old and soft. I use the expression ‘compel myself to do those things’ – that shouldn’t even come into it! I don’t think I was ever capable of doing it. And it was my doing. I wanted this, and I got it. All I ever wanted was to be older. But I thought age had to do with time and years that I didn’t have; something that I could wish for and never get. My youthful appearance would always have the final word – and I hated that. Like hair dye, I could fake it almost imperceptibly, but it would never stick. Being where I am now is like dying your hair pink for years and then waking up one morning and finding that it’s growing out of your scalp.
Age is a state of mind, and it works in reverse too. I’ve got old in the head. Once my body catches up a little and they stop asking me for ID at the liquor store, I’ll never again have licence to do crazy things.

I have very few things to connect me with this age. My want to do music. My teenage body clock, staying up till the wee hours and getting up late. Eating at weird times and whenever I please. Strangely enough, even though he’s told me he would like it if I acted my age, these are three things that irk my partner about me. And even stranger than that is the fact the he is the only person who has ever made me feel nostalgic for this age, defensive of it even. All the things that he did in those years. His childlike awe at autumn. I have never seen anyone like autumn as he does. It makes me want to cry like the girl with the stuffed toy from the claw machine did. That innocence that I swore I would never let of, let leave me, have them take away from me, however you want to put it. He still has it for autumn, even after 37 years. I feel like I lost a lot of it. In less than half that time. He’s a lot more youthful than me in a lot of ways. I say ‘what a load of rot’ and I’d never put napkins in anyone’s dinner. I’ll always remember the second time he had a go at my actions on account of my age, and I wrote him this huge letter, defending the validity of my age, typed on my phone, which I read out to him as he drove me to the station for the first time. And when we got there I said “If I’m nearly as old as you are now, imagine what I’ll be like when I really am your age.” It scares me a little. Where I’ll end up. He asks me whether I’ll drink like I do now, like he does with me, when I’m 37. I won’t. And even though I sit here telling you how saddened I would be by losing that youthful impracticality, and what sentimental value the actions that connect me to my age have – I still want to quash them. I abhor them. They haven’t been eradicated for lack of trying. It’s a crack in the façade. It’s that same betrayal I felt when the readers of this blog found out I was 16.

Dichotomy, dichotomy, dichotomy...

I don’t know. I feel like maybe he’ll show me what it’s like to be teenager. He’s going to give me that opportunity. In a way he is showing me. He did it. For real. He felt it. And his stories just blow my mind. The immediateness of it all. The not thinking. He makes me feel youthful because he’s youthful, and because he’s technically the adult I don’t have to be one. I was always the mother in my relationships. I am beginning to see that immature men are both drawn to me, and as part of some sick unconscious life lesion I am drawn to them.
In another way my age is driving us apart. There are certain unavoidable things about the mindset of the 18 year old. I’m like a behaviouralist dissecting an adolescent. I’m like a 30-something in a teenagers body, but they gave me all the hormones too, just to mess with my head. I know what it is, I know what it means, I FUCKING UNDERSTAND, but I can’t do a thing about the way I feel.
That awareness is the most painful thing of all.
It doesn’t work. Being a teenager doesn’t make sense to me. Ignorance may be bliss, but if you’re not ignorant you will find no bliss in it.

But I don’t want to get old. I don’t want to dry up. I want to do something irrational. I want to make up for my post-high school summer. While I still have a chance.

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