I would say girl-hood was meted out to me in colors. It has come to people in milestones or memories or lessons, but in my case it has always been a palette of warm golds and bright pinks, impossible blues, and green in a way that is almost like summer whispering secrets. Perhaps this is dramatic, but much of being a teen girl is about learning to see yourself in more refracted, more bright modes, and I have always used color to express that.
There was no one starting point of the story I would like to tell, however, assuming that there is one, it would be that of an April morning drenched in the yellow sunlight. That type of light, which feigns softiness, but bold intensity. I was before my mirror in a dress that I could never have the heart to put on. It was smooth and lilac and faintly scented with the fabric softener my mother had been fond of. I recall gripping the hem, looking with displeased expression at my mirror, then rumpling my hair millions of times.
You resemble spring my mother had remarked when she ruled out.
I looked away, but also I smiled. “I look… weird.”
“You look like yourself.”
It was as though she had said so in the most natural way possible, in a low and easy tone, as though it were the natural law of existence, and the thing that had persistently disturbed my heart, the chestiness, came to a halt.
I walked to school that morning and could have sworn that I had the sun in my pockets. I recall hearing my own footsteps on the sidewalk, hearing them, just to the beat of my breathing, and how I was exceedingly out of step with the world. The dress did not necessarily fix my insecurities in a magic way- nothing does. But putting it on was posing as possessing a small fragment of valor. I believe that girlhood consists of such small assertions, those instances, when you make a surprise at yourself and realize the fact that you grow.
I did not receive dramatic gasps and wild applause at school with my friends. They only grinned at me as though they had been waiting to see me in this form.
Lilac is appropriate to you, I said, nudging you with my shoulder.
“It’s very… you,” Asha added.
The point is that, I did not even know who was supposedly you yet. In their accents, however, I heard something not complex, nor harsh,-whence, even as I listened to them, there was familiarity, familiarity, with me.
A little later in the afternoon something smaller took place but somehow it became one of those things that always remains soft. Sunset after school we would head to the little park behind the library, which was our secret club where we laughed and gossiped. The essence of the garden was that of the sort of place only teenagers believe to be magical, three swings, a bench rotating unsteadily, and a huge gulmohar tree that had trees that would drop orange petals as confetti.
I went off with my shoes and allowed the grass to feel my birth. I do not know why that part swung but it swung. I felt rooted in being bare-foot, as though the grass knew something about me which I did not know.
Zoe was standing on the edges of the sandbox holding out her arms and acting like a tightrope walker. Asha was cross-legged, and she offered me imaginary microphones as she played out the role of interpreting the events as I debuted as a fashionable icon. The laugh caused me pain in my stomach.
And it was then, with the two people who watched me, who looked at me in a way that I need not always be looking at myself, that I saw something: that happiness was not something that it was good to fall into, but something that it was good to be holding.
I remember that April day shining in my memory was not that anything big happened, rather that I seemed to have entered my own story.
However, girlhood, at least my girlhood is not composed of glowing days alone, it is a piece of tapestry of little fetes that embroider themselves into something unity. Similar to the time when I got to know how to braid my own hair. It will sound absurd at best but it truly felt like I was unlocking a superpower.
I had always been dependent on my mother or my elder cousin. My fingers would just mingle estranged as my hair. On one Saturday evening, however, boredom persuaded me that I should give it another attempt. I was sitting before my mirror and decided, tongue sticking out, as is always the case when I am too hard on myself.
Under-over, under-over.
The pattern was the spell that I repeated.
An hour and a half after that I was able to have somewhat of a crooked braid--but it was my own. There were pains in my arms, my shoulders, and I still recall smiling at myself with the same pride that I usually do after finishing an exam or knowing how to ride a bicycle.
And weirdly enough, it is that braid that taught me most of all about optimism. It helped me to remember that development does not always come loudly. That party does not necessarily have to have applause, at times it is as simple as you realizing that you can be a little stronger than you were yesterday.
One more memory that burns vividly in my mind is one I had last summer. My cousins and I were just planning to prepare lemonade by ourselves not because of any better reason than because the day felt like it needed something sweet. The heat was tormenting, and the sort of heat that causes air to tremble, and we had established a small lemonade stand near our building.
We didn’t sell any lemonade. Not even to our neighbours who trained it as cute though superfluous. But that wasn’t the point. The thing was that we had spent two hours laughing because the wind continued to topple our hand-drawn sign, and the sugar continued to clump in the jar and my cousin kept squeezing lemons so vigorously that the juice would squirt up at her own eye.
I think, there was no chance to empty that half of our product only because we were so bored, as we were sitting on the hot pavement talking about the school crushes and our future.
I have recollections that I want a life like this- easy, sunny, sweet.
My cousin said, yes, I must have said something profound.
“You will,” she told me. You are that type of person that catches sunshine.
That stuck with me. It still does.
I also remember the night when my friends and I visited the rooftop when there was a power cut. It was black, yet no frightening black--a sort of blanket which covered us. The lights of the city at the bottom were wavering and the sky seemed too broad. We sank a pair of blankets out on the floor and lay in a line and gazed up.
Do you ever mean you are walking on the verge of your own life? Zoe whispered.
We all nodded. Teen girls understand that sensation very well, the one where you feel everything is going to start, even when you are unsure of what exactly everything really is.
After that, they suddenly burst into a song by Asha singing some corny song out of tune. We sang along and our tones harmonized in that way that cannot be achieved when no one is beginning to sing too, too hard.
And even amid our singing in the warm dark I was aware of the enlargement of the world and its softening simultaneously. I felt… held. Safe. Seen. A little world created on that rooftop, created of our words and the mutual silence in our assurance that we were not the only ones in our development.
But, perhaps the most strong experience, one that showed me, as I know, what happiness may truly be like, was on a morning when it was far quieter than any other.
I got up before anyone in my house, and went out. A dew-cum-jasmine odour smelt in the air. The sky was so blushing, like a tender pink. I omitted the steps and sat on them with a cup of hot tea, and simply breathed.
Nothing dramatic about that moment. Neither laughter nor friends nor milestones. Me alone, in the morning, and the peace of mind that I had never suspected dishonest self was troubling me.
And that is when I came to realize that positive girlhood does not necessarily have to be loud. It is not always glittered or laughed or dresses or friendships that glitter. It’s just having the serenity of knowing that you are becoming someone you like occasionally. Might to be proud to see you in the mirror.
In the morning, when the sky was drifting over my head, I was closer to myself than I never was. As I could hear the very low murmur of my own hopes.
I opened that moment as a one dress flower. It was mine—pure, simple, whole.
All these moments when I look back at them are a mosaic of celebration. No ideal celebration, no movie-like montages, but real ones constructed by means of:
The boldness to set on a lilac dress.
The tender call of the step of laughing bare foot in a park.
It was the success of a braid of hair.
Lemonade sweetness of its failure.
The roof songs which pinned us together.
The silence of the morning which has taught me to love being myself.
My definition of girlhood is in understanding that joy need not be pursued, it will be found in all places, it is just waiting to be observed. It is learning that optimism is something that can be practiced, a decision, as simple as rebellion to every suspicion. It is learning that celebration has not to do with something extraordinary being transacted around you; it is to do with extraordinary being transacted in you.
And one thing I do know both certain, it is this:
I have peacock sunshine in my pockets.
I am learning to let it spill.
I am maturing--brilliantly, courageously, positively--
into my own color.
-Iyithihya Prakash