She is curled up

She is curled up on her bed with her legs all willy-nilly in a T-shirt that’s comfortably too large and shorts that are barely shorts and she hugs her knees to her chest and thinks and it isn’t really the sad kind of thinking but just the thinking and the wondering over how she became this thing that she is now and she clutches her Molly doll to her chest and remembers when she cradled her and dressed her and even bathed her and called her a baby and it’s so strange how, now, people are afraid she’ll make babies simply because she’s in love and how is it that her rosy little girl cheeks turned into this tired little pizza face and what is this aching in her breasts that plagues her for two weeks out of the month when it feels like someone has been pinching and twisting and beating her nipples and what is this aching and throbbing in her once little body that now has her doubled over, whimpering and moaning and what are all of these strange feelings and why must it all hurt so much? what are these tests she keeps failing and these expectations she disappoints when once every step seemed to be success and with every failure the people who now wag their fingers at her once would pick her up and dust her off and tell her she was only learning but she’s learned now and she should know better and there’s no excuse for her failures and how has it become this way? staring at the ceiling and whimpering as her breasts ache and her abdomen sears and tears apart inside of her and her face is itchy and feels like a disease and all of these raging hormones have her being watched like a criminal because any move she makes could end in pregnancy and where have the days gone? where have the days gone when boys and girls could be friends without point or expectation and where have the days gone when playing was playing and school was school and there was time for both and where have the days gone when we talked about what we wanted to be when we grew up and everyone told us we didn’t need to know yet and it was okay and it didn’t matter when now that they tell us failure to plan is a plan to fail and now we’re all doomed because we had too high of hopes and now we find we can’t reach them to figure out what they were from the start because we’ve forgotten everything so perfectly, forgotten what it was like to be pure and now I’m dirty with these strange new feelings and pains and greases and hormones all mixed up in this strange-smelling stew that is so very, very confusing and not so much upsetting as puzzling and maybe it’s a little sad to realize what we’ve lost but it’s more a matter of not understanding how we’ve become who we’ve become and I keep wondering and wondering and wondering how I became this and I say this not because I’m a thing or a beast or a mysterious creature but I’m not sure anymore if I’m a girl or a woman because I’m trapped in this strange middle phase between girl and woman and I’m too big now to be the first just like you can’t fit in one of those silly kiddy rides where your knees get all scrunched up but at the same time if I tried to fit into a woman’s pants they’d be those pants that sunk to my ankles and made everyone giggle behind their hands at my brightly colored underwear because I like to feel the slightest bit exciting beneath my clothes and I don’t want life to be that way where the excitement is all hidden under being old and grown up and nice looking I want wear my panties on the outside and my shirt under my bra and be irregular because I feel so irregular now so maybe if I’m extra irregular I can find some sort of normal to get me less confused. I never expected growing up to be like this. hmm.