coming-of-age

Could a scar be like the rings of a tree, reopened with each emotional season?

If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;!

The damage and destruction from the soft brush of pen on paper, a minuscule twitch of muscles at the end of manicured fingers, and people's lives forever altered.

Adam stared down at me, his expression thunderous. __t was you. I know it was you._ My head was rocking side to side before I could stop it. __o._ I wrenched my hand free of his. __ou__e wrong._____ not!_ Anger blazed hot behind his eyes as they burned into me. __ook at me, Kia! Look me in the eye and tell me you__e not her.

She leans over the desk to write and even though I feel bad for doing it, I watch her body as she does. Her shirt lifts just a little as she__ bending over and whether she__ aware of it or not, her lower back is exposed. I__e spent the last eight years ignoring this girl, but one small view of her back and it__ putting my body into overdrive. I__e never wanted to kiss someone there so much in my life.

There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule's head, and Jule's feet were planted on Goodman's head, and so on and so on. And didn't it always go like that-body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

Was still between Martha and Jane, then, I was. Between the girl I was and who I wanted to be.

wasn__ no bit of me willing to ride shotgun to my own funeral.

I was the luckiest girl. Don__ you think because I didn__ have no proper man or husband I was anything else. Wasn__ no place I__ rather be than right there. Even now, I pine for that uncomfortable rock. Because he was watching over me and loneliness was some far off thing, echoing off the Rock from other folks. Wasn__ nothing could ruin it for me.

Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of Godbetter than the visions themselves? Then you think,none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigaretteand think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts.

It was almost painful to be different.

Life is a valuable and unique opportunityto discover who you are.But it seems as soon as you nearanswering that age-old question,something unexpected always happensto alter your course.And who it is you thought you weresuddenly changes.Then comes the frustrating realizationthat no matter how long life endures,no matter how many experiencesare muddled through in this existence,you may never really be ableto answer the question....Who am I? Because the answer, like the seasons,constantly, subtly, inevitably changes.And who it is you are today,is not the same person you will be tomorrow.

When I was younger, my mom loved to garden. But the flowers would never grow. She kept planting seeds even thought nothing would grow. She just kept trying.''I don't understand.''Because you can't.''What does this have to do with anything?'I don't fiddle with my fingers and there's no apology on the tip of my tongue when I say, 'I am my mother's son.

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.

I fall in love with Paraíso. It__ like a giant playground where I__ never scolded for running around recklessly, where I__ almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami__ family. In New York, I__ invisible.

Growing up, I never felt deprived. I was always happy. It seems only lately I've started seeing everything I didn't have.

We can change in one day. We can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in one day.

When it was time to board my flight, I took one last glance back. I knew that I had everything with me so it was not a "make sure I have everything" glance. It was more like a parting glance to Philadelphia, my home, America- for I would not be coming back for ten months. (Ch 5- Twenty in Paris)