Not a girl. Not a woman.
That night, when she looked in the bathroom mirror, she saw only one face. Fine lines and freckles. A chin that still quivered sometimes. Eyes that had seen weddings and funerals, promotions and pink slips, the slow death of a marriage and the first fragile breath of something new. girl v woman
Clara laughed, and the laugh cracked into something raw. She wasn’t strong. She was a girl in a grown-up’s body, terrified of the dark, of being alone, of the silence where a partner’s breathing used to be. Not a girl
The girl wanted wonder. The woman wanted a safe place to land. Both were valid. Both were her . Fine lines and freckles
But at twenty-five, the girl inside her began to whisper. The woman had a 401(k) and a boyfriend who remembered her birthday but not the name of her favorite book. The girl wanted to lie in the grass and watch clouds shape-shift into dragons. The woman scheduled a promotion meeting. The girl wanted to call her mother just to hear her say, “Baby, you’ll figure it out.” The woman was supposed to have already figured it out.
Clara drove home. She changed out of the pencil skirt into worn flannel pajamas. She made boxed macaroni and cheese—the neon orange kind the girl loved—and ate it sitting on the floor of her living room, the woman’s beige sofa behind her. Then she opened her laptop and, for the first time in months, wrote a poem. It was clumsy. It was honest. It was neither grown-up nor childish.
