Changeling

For me, it all came down at fourteen. I was a skinny kid, with awkward corners that were yet to smooth down, and a gangliness in my limbs that was just starting to slough away. 

Innocence was getting a little short around the ankles, and I could feel my girlness beginning to grow and change inside it, beginning to tighten in places I hadn't thought about before.

My own innocence was so familiar it almost didn't exist to me, other than this tightness around my body, which brought an itchy desire to pull free of it. 

I let it slip from my body as casually as an outfit my mother had picked out, as thoughtlessly as if I might get it back someday. 

It was that easy. Gravity took it. I didn't pick it up or, gingerly, fold it, crease by crease, into a tidy pile. 

I didn't take one final look, as I can do now, in retrospect, to handle its precious edges, showing their wear at the cuffs and sleeves from a long childhood spent idly and unselfconsciously romping in it.  

I just let it fall. 

I was a shy and edgy kind of kid, with thick bangs that I hid behind like a duck blind, only I was the duck. My hair, a dusty blond brown was growing back from a short cropping in the 8th grade - the year before - and I remember, even including the bangs which directly fringed the top of my vision, my hair was very far in the background of my reality. I wasn't all that worried about it because I wasn't very good at that kind of stuff. 

I wasn't disinterested, exactly, more carefully aloof, even to myself, about matters of looks and beauty. 

But boys were noticing me. Not my age boys, the ones I had crushes on the years before. Different boys. Boys in my sisters grade, strange boys, older boys. And I was interested in them. 

During this time my parents were spinning in their own worlds of confusion and re-orientation. We were all hanging, suddenly and jarringly separate, in the forceful redistribution of divorce. So there was no one, other than my sister - a high school senior - keeping an especially close eye on me. 

My sister was my mother then, which was convenient. I mean convenient for the shedding of innocence. 

And there was no other way. The uncontrolled disintegration of my family was compressed by my awkwardly and untimely becoming no longer a child; while my skinny arms, even wound tight around me, could not contain the adult that I wasn't. The only way I could make sense of myself was to transform.

There was no room for me in my body, which was galvanized and terrifyingly secret, and there was no room for me anywhere else, and the only way to make room was to try going places that were bigger - farther. 

There is no place as easy to go much farther than you are ready, than in the arms of an 18 year old boy at night. 

And it was in those arms, with those zippers, and smokes, hands and fingers, the same underwear my mother had washed for me the year before being seen on my body, being reached around with a deftness which seemed worldly and unknown, it was under those tee shirts, with those abdominal muscles flat as a school chair, where I rolled my self over and over in an effort to weave something in which I could change, transform myself somehow through heat and pressure into something else, something where I was lovely and strange and free, and unimaginably precious, to somebody.