“Coming of Age”

The summer before I turned fourteen I had a sugar-sweet childhood of peaches and peanut butter. I stacked summers soaked in saltwater, lilacs, honeysuckle, and popsickles on top of one another in layers that melted together. By the summer of 2005, I was a woman. My first solo outings were the frequent trips I took to the neighborhood pharmacy where I bought makeup and hair supplies. My best friend and I sipped smoothies from neon straws and snagged ice pops from the camp we worked at together. We emphatically defined ourselves in our own words, and the beaches, burritos, and boys that followed remain top secret between us.

At fourteen, I assumed something connected my dreams and their (un) reality; after all, why not? I had a lifetime of collecting waking dreams woven together at sleepovers and nights staying up to the radio I kept by my bed. That summer, Sean Paul’s “Temperature” burned holes in ears while the MTV Music Video Awards made hearts skip a beat. It seemed like everyone was talking about living lives just as they planned to live them. Something that summer let me in on the greatest secret I’ll never keep—we are the stuff our dreams make us up to become and the rest is history.

At fourteen, I was full of conflict and contradictions. Today, I find myself at odds with the haves and have-nots within me. To steal the words of an unknown author, “I am the first and the last … I am the silence that is incomprehensible and the idea whose remembrance is frequent” (“The Thunder, Perfect Mind”). All women claim their identity through a myriad of contradictions that stretch to define us all. For we are at once fourteen, forgotten, and unforgettable.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol