A Screaming Secret.

"Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spots" - Samuel

I was 6 years old when my sister was born and I couldn’t quite unravel the idea of her growing up. How could she grow up to be my age? How could she grow to be that big? I vividly recall holding her in my tiny arms for the first ever time, tighter than I’d held anything. She was profusely crying with her eyes shut but all I heard was silence, the world had inevitably gone quiet as I tried to comprehend how someone the size of this child would deal with the troubles of this world; learn how to tie shoe laces, have to get out of a warm bed in the morning for school, be able to understand which toys were hers to play with. And so, the night prior to her first birthday, I kept waking up to see her ‘grow’. Yet unfamiliar with the ways in which the universe plotted our lives for us, I envisioned a fairy circling her, helping her magically grow taller. For a very long and confusing time, I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t grow.

It was only years later I realized that we grow up just as the earth revolves around the sun; changing completely yet unknowingly.

Growing up is a subtle act, it is gradual, unintentional, and enthralling through and through. I didn’t realize I’d been hit by the calamity until one day I made my bed and I didn't need to show it to my mother anymore. I didn’t need her to give me a pat on the back, a homely smile so that I would know I had done her proud. Instead, I learned to drag myself out of bed, the skeleton inside creaking at the mere thought of straightening the creases on my bed when the ones on my soul had left a permanent scar.

I didn't know I'd grown until I learned to walk away from everything that kept me awake last night, everything that wouldn’t leave me alone simply by a pat on the back so I learned to carry it along like a shadow. More so, I learned to put my facades on right before dawn because God forbid the shadows see daylight, let alone be recognized by anyone.

I wouldn't lie and say that I didn't feel like the universe was mocking me. It was painfully ironic to realize that what would determine the course of my entire life was realized by no one else but me. Could no one else hear my heart shatter to pieces as I fought for air to breathe? Or when I walked on stranded streets on winter nights hoping to feel something?

But after all, it is a wound all of us carry; a screaming secret.

It is the way of the world.

It descends slowly yet quietly, like a maiden escaping her lover's room at midnight. And so without wanting to despite denying it, we realize we’ve grown up when each of us has something to hide, blood on our hands that is no one else’s but our own, when we feel lost every day but stop crying for our parents, when we gulp pills to numb headaches that aren’t meant to go away. Most of all, when we learn to catch our breaths so no hint of human emotion slips to touch the pillowcase before sleep envelops us.

But like a swift robber, the thought creeps inside my head on days when it rains hard enough or other times when my head hits the pillow; at some point, an earthquake occurred and the aftershocks never stopped. And we got used to it; the feeling of being ready to evacuate, to hold nothing dear, and to find humor where a tragedy was supposed to be.

We learned to survive

And that has made all the difference.

And so the story goes on, sluggishly yet swiftly, a thousand nights worth one pass, and we are never the same. Now, I realize something that 6-year-old me couldn’t decipher, growth doesn’t come hidden inside the wings of a pretty little creature. It comes hidden under the blanket of sleepless eyes, and smiles that ache, breakfast turned to coffee, and the inability to let out anything that crawls your skin.

We must continuously hush the voices inside ourselves, tell them that it’s okay, that the world isn’t coming to an end if there is no one to tie your shoelaces anymore. In fact, you do a pretty good job on your own!