- Dahlia Arielle Jimenez Evans
- Apr 30
- 6 min read
One of the most damning things about being in your late teens to early twenties is that you’ve lost the innocence but haven’t quite yet lost the naivete.
At eighteen you’re the height you will be until you die, in fact expecting a steady decline, because in many ways you have been told it’s only down from here. At nineteen years old your body is filled but expels no wrinkles, At twenty your nails are done but not your cuticles, you never recognize your cuticles. That is unless your mother was insistent on telling you it was a teller to manipulative, bad-faith, sneaky, conniving, shadows of people who were looking for access points to your trauma. But if that wasn’t your mother, then the world hasn’t really given you reason to consider your cuticles yet. I mean sure you’re not in a disillusioned state of reality, rocking your body back-and-forth with your arms hugging your torso in the corner of your living room with the lights off and your hair touching the ceiling in disbelief about their existence. But if you were to be requested to find the cuticles on your person, you’d be relatively neutral at twenty-years-old to recognize that they’re a little cracked, picked at, and vary finger to finger. If they offered you twenty for an emotional evaluation you might say that you don’t really identify the cuticles as the root of your nails, but instead the end, you know of its existence but don't really care because your nail bed lay atop with seemingly no consequence even if the cuticle has residue of blood, food, or grime. But most distinctively you’d be logical in describing that your heart’s not in it, your worth not restricted to its manicure, and to spend so much money and thought on the tip of your hand, one of the parts of your body that defines its capacity, would be, reasonably, a waste of time.
This is for a reason.
Similarly, in Elementary your hands smelled like blacktop and your nose like warm rubber. If you were like me, and an afterschool kid, you ate snacks packed from an orange plastic container that was far too difficult to open. When your arms finally extended its full capacity, not realizing the grace probably lied in your wrist, you would nearly bop someone in the face to be faced with maybe one or two redeemable snacks from the 6 or 7 looking up at you. If you were kind, you’d trade. You’d maybe get to eat the Spam Musubi your friend’s mom packed because she was too embarrassed to eat it. You wouldn’t get why she would be embarrassed of something so delicious and why she thought it was a fair trade to instead eat a collection of cube yellow stick cheese that eventually stopped being served because we’d squeeze them on the bleachers until it sprayed out the vacuum sealed bag smelling like plastic and looking like it came from a canister.
You made friends on seemingly no basis. Afterall they weren’t dripped out in chains and iced out in diamonds. They were kids, innocent and playful, absorbent and fast.
Middle school came and now friendship was conditional. There were cliques and people’s shoes was now a determinant of the path they’d soon walk in and the people who’d join them. Still the lines were blurred, the popular girl still knew the nerd’s name, recognized his face, and his humanity. But God, was everyone annoying. Or maybe God was annoying everyone.
Something sinister happens during this time, perhaps in part it’s the heightened sexual awareness that inspires 12-year-old boys to moan their answer when the teacher cold-calls them. The same teachers who were too amused by some of this behavior to correct it, to address how uncomfortable it made them. Jesus, how isolating it is to be thirteen years old, to have the rug pulled out from under you, to have your inclusion tested based on how many people you were away from receiving the original recording of the fight after school at the corner store.
It wasn’t all bad, there were bright sides, you maybe had that one friend, I know I did, who was your girl. Who knew the rules the same as you but never bothered to break the 4th wall to talk about them. It probably would end up being just too difficult. Class was pointless. You somewhere down the line put 2 and 2 together to realize the remedial math was more for the teacher’s instruction than the students. Soon-to-be runaways were close with their young millennial English teacher who you could tell had a Pinterest board labeled “Classroom Decor” with an opening frame teasing the remaining content of grey, owls, grey owls an apple and a worm with glasses unwilling to decide between the minimalism of a New York penthouse and quirkiness of a Kindergarten class in a middle-class neighborhood. Because this particular teacher was white and extremely flattered that this group of soon-to-be runaway Brown kids grew comfortable, she in turn became the cool mom from ‘Mean Girls.’ How when Alyssa asked why her period would happen once a week for two days at a time, you remember over hearing this teacher respond with “Girl, sometimes it is how it is.” I don’t think Ms. Mulligan ever realized it was because we didn’t respect her, after all her 2016 makeup and slightly green eyebrows didn’t help. (I don’t think she ever did her makeup in natural light.)
High School came after, and that summer bridging 8th grade to 9th is so strange. You start to let go of the implicit commandments, your loyalties shift, and things were ending not because of beef, but because you’re understanding time’s mystery for the first time. Suddenly things aren’t that deep anymore, it’s not as shallow but it’s somehow even harsher. You’re starting to express yourself and shape your world. Getting into relationships that make no sense. Relationships that are way above your paygrade. This is life as an underclassman. Everyone’s wearing black now, everyone’s indifferent now, sometimes the teacher you choose as a mentor doesn’t choose you back. Everyone lies in the bed they made with their shoes on, but by the time they became upperclassmen they finally unlaced them slowly and apprehensively, but ultimately took the shoes off too.
Senior year, all bets are off, you kidding me? Everyone’s become nostalgic and so they do the unthinkable. They break the fourth wall of middle school. They talk about memories with a clarity they typically don’t speak in, not because they have practiced, but because the emotions had been lived-in. Then you graduate. You weren’t handed a diploma, you were handed a clock. Time is telling and we’re recognizing patterns.
Now I recognize not all of you grew up like I did, but has time whipped you like it has me?
19 is an exhausting and berating year.
It’s exhausting because life is still so traceable but the dreams are unidentifiable.
You can still reverse-engineer cause and effect.
You have the exposure to relationships, heartbreak, passion, and time, that will only intensify as you understand which you are in pursuit of and which you will do anything to stay away from.
Essentially you have what you need.
In an emotional framework, the goals of life really are so simple.
The job you get will be about what it makes you feel. About who you’re making proud or maybe if you’re lucky the time you’re finally stepping up to the plate that had your name written all over it since the day of your parents’ conception.
Jesus are mentors stingy, did their mentors advise them frugality? Did the mentors of our mentors falsely tell them every word costs money? Because not for a second did anyone rope me in to brace me for the whiplash I'd experience as I got old enough to become 19. How when people speak of their difficult lives they would not be referring to the shortcomings of their circumstantial life, but instead their short-lived chosen one. They in fact will be insistent you shut-up about your parents and your past, whispering presence and focus is the condition of your merit. Fck you, seriously? We don’t have shared history, but we do have shared consequence. Are you 19?
If memories were physical, I’m sure you’d feel neutral about putting a name to them too.
19 is an awful year, it’s harder for me than it is you. Let me see it through with patience. Let me unlearn the education I was court-ordered to attend, let me jump through some hoops without your clenched teeth and shaken head.
You keep your cuticles unmanicured, but judge the feet. Explain that to me. You hate the shoes but love the footprints. Explain that to me. You’re a pedicurist critic, you judge the polish and the uniformity, but you yourself have unkempt cuticles. Explain that to me.
All of this is okay, aging is okay. I’m not shouting “HYPOCRITE,” it’s not the nastiest word I know.
All I’m shouting is, “I’m not interested in your grace, give me mercy!”
