Old Enough to Understand

You knew things about the world that I didn’t. About power. About attention. About what it means when a man looks at a girl like she’s exceptional instead of vulnerable.

Could you tell going in, that I was so starved for love that a little taste would have me craving more? Needing more.

And maybe that’s the part that unsettles me now. Not the memories themselves, but the realization that at fifteen I thought being wanted was the same thing as being safe. I thought proximity to adulthood made me adult. I mistook intensity for wisdom. Hunger for readiness.

I can’t say you took advantage of me. I would have denied it with passion. I knew what I was doing. I chose this. I’m not naïve. I’m mature. I see what this is, and I want it.

But adolescence is strange that way. We think participation equals power. We think understanding what is happening means we are equal inside of it.

I don’t hate you. I can’t be mad at you. I don’t feel that something happened to me. That would almost make the story simpler than it is. You were woven into my life in a way that makes you part of my grand adventure. Loving you opened doors for me. It forced a very necessary change in my living and care arrangements. It made my life larger. It made me imagine escape, meaning, possibility. There are parts of me that were born in the aftermath of you.

But time has shifted the camera angle. I can zoom out and get the whole picture in frame.

Now when I picture fifteen-year-old me, I don’t see the femme fatale I imagined myself to be. I see a girl standing barefoot in the middle of her own ache, desperate to be chosen, glowing with the kind of loneliness that makes affection feel holy.

And I wonder what you saw when you looked at her.

Because objectively, you were a fox.

And I was a bird.