I don’t know whether my parents have raised me or I have raised myself. It’s like I have been thrown here and nothing connects me to my past. The dolls that I’d played with aren’t mine. And the cells that made up my body when my father used to help me cross the streets had died long ago. I am not a child anymore. But I don’t know how I’ve ended up here. In this body and in this place and far, far from home. I remember fighting with my parents to send me here. I remember the conviction with which I’d pleaded with them, I remember passion and the fiery will. Was that a child? Was that me? What had enabled me to pursue what I’m pursuing, and what pushes me now?
I know I am a grown-up yet I don’t know what the word implies. Is my thinking pattern more regular than it was, say, two years ago when I’d turned 18? I commute by myself. I use my own hands to feed me and I can give advice. Or swallow it without throwing up. I am comfortable with looking stupid, although not yet comfortable with admitting that I’d cried while watching ‘Looking For Alaska’. Looking For Alaska isn’t for adults particularly.
I am starting to believe that childhood might be a social construct. Not entirely though. Because I am approaching 21 and I don’t know how to cross a road, how exactly to talk to a stranger, or how to properly present myself. But I was told that I am more than the sum of my parts.
The things that are characteristic of a child are present in me and the things that are characteristic of an adult I also possess. I am a multitude of things and I know Wittman would be happy to hear that. Just years ago I was dependent on so many things and so many people and had taken every hobby as a part of my identity. Now I am amazed at how I have transformed into someone whose identity is independent of the media they are consuming or the actions they consistently perform.
I might still be a child. I have outgrown the womb I was once in, but it does not mean that I do not long for my bearer. My father does not hold my hand when we cross the road anymore. All the roads I’m crossing now belong to a city he wasn’t raised in. But that does not mean I don’t miss the way his hand had encompassed mine. I look at the pair of a father and his child and I am not sure what I find more difficult: being the child or the father. I look at a mother and her daughter and I am not sure what I long to be more. In the end, I know what I am. I am a child in need of consolation; I too am the motherly hands that console.
