eleven…

Eleven was an awful age. My body was longer every day, but still a child’s. My curly hair shorn by a barber, I felt ugly, buck-toothed. But worse, perhaps, was the sense of being caught in some inarticulate in-between place, where neither childhood nor adulthood were accessible, and where I might hover, in purgatory, forever. Not girl, not woman, not cute, not pretty, I became acutely aware of the voluptuous changes in the girls around me, shared in the whispered secrets but could not claim or pretend to be in any way different myself. I thought I might be a boy, a changeling, an alien. Not yet adolescent enough to be embarrassed by my mother, I was embarrassed by my self. My mother, who had no insights or balms to offer, seemed to recognize in me a familiar awkwardness and sketched me again and again until I escaped her view and she was forced to turn for a model to the gawky girl she saw in the mirror.
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sketched on the back of a Christmas card: jik at 11 by DAK