i feel obligated to move beyond the delicacies of a supposedly blurry-eyed childteenhood. during those teen years, we are overcome by the guilt to grow into our presupposed adult skins, a guilt reinforced by our parents, our teachers, and, eventually and sadly, ourselves.
this is a liminal period, we are told and have come to believe, a period of transition which follows a carefully mapped-out trajectory so perfectly set by those who breathed before us, in tracks like those chariot grooves i saw engraved into the cobblestone streets of Pompeii (perhaps even after the almost complete annihilation of a society and its elusive structures, its beliefs still haunt us).
i'm not sure what's worse: the discounting of teenagers or the discounting of education, of learning being limited only to formal series of years. what does the word pubescent convey? i'm becoming more and more interested how the "adult world" and the "teen world" merge together and function as an evolving whole. what, for instance, attracted a married forty-five-year-old pablo picasso to his muse, marie-therese, who, at seventeen, was seemingly helplessly absorbed into the aura of the famed cubist so much so that she was in bed with him in the week of their first, enchanted meeting? what drew an also married thirty-eight-year-old john steinbeck to gywn conger, who, at twenty, was both singer and avid reader of steinbeck novels?
perhaps a power dynamic exists in these relationships between older men and younger women, possibly set on the premise of these men viewing their partners as girls. did these artists take advantage of what they considered virginity and naivete? i'm not even sure marie-therese and gywn would agree. perhaps these women thought themselves out of fashion with their age group, perhaps they viewed themselves as more mature and emboldened to develop fiery affairs and tumultuous relationships with men twice and triple their age.
i, too, have wrestled with the slow twilights; i have considered the politics of being with someone who is significantly beyond his teenage years. it seems to me that when dating people with proximity to our age, we expect to be on the same page mentally; with the barriers of decades pulling couples back, we burden our lovers with stereotypes of what it feels to be many, many years older or younger.
in early june, i turned twenty. and, as expected, i don't feel a shade different now that my teenage years have been brushed away as when i
had grappled with was it was like to be in the heat of seventeen. maybe it's pretentious of me to say that i saw it coming all along, that somehow i've combated with time and history and won enough dignity back to say that turning twenty did not change my outlook on what it means to be curious yet skeptical, daring yet restrained, knowing, yet not knowing at all of any years to come. but then again, i think we all have the drive to prove our ages wrong.
