musings at nineteen

i am turning twenty in nineteen days and every day i am reminded of what a strange and wonderful and frightening thing it is to be here, and alive, and have the entirety of my life ahead of me – to have nothing, to want everything, the perhaps lightness of being without a tether to any man, any country, any home.

i have been recently reading the bell jar and i’m not sure whether i fancy myself as an esther or whether that’s just the fundamental experience of girlhood into womanhood in a way that only plath could understand. i do feel a bit like her fig tree story. like i’m laying in the warmth and staring up at hundreds of possibilities of my future; a great explorer, a sharp professor, a beauty queen, a lover, a melodramatic poet. with only the hope to choose who i will be before all the figs turn black and drop heavy to the earth beside my worn, weary, blond head.

i choose abundance. i choose light. i choose love. i choose life.