Puberty

"I mainly tried to draw from my and most of my female friends' experience of going through puberty and also societal expectations of what femininity means and the superficial aspect of it all." - D.B.

We surround the almost salmon colored cedar wood table, cloaked with a laced veil of white and frill. The frill extending to the sides of the table flanking the borders with a sensibility of naivety. Our blonde heads bob to the harmonious melody of the music from nowhere. They move together as if in a trance of ecstasy. Our eyes, blue and pink admire each other in our innocence. Our hands involved in producing the cacophonic pitter patter of glass cups hitting their kin and metal spoons coated in rose gold clinking against the saucer. Our fingers sugar coated from the cream filled custard doughnuts and slightly tinted from the pink-red colored macarons and sticky with the crumbs of the wan cupcakes diseased with white chocolate chips. Our legs sitting gracefully on top of the other in a statue like fairness as we serve the tea from the ginormous pale ceramic kettle never moving from the exact center even after numerous uses. Our lips tinted with pink and honey as we suckle the sugar from our fingertips as gracefully and sensuously as taught. The air fills with the smog of pink and tight-bellied chuckles. The lacy napkins sit as elegantly as us on our pale white thighs and catch any mistakes that may attempt to slander our white floral sundresses. Each one of us carrying spoons of various shades of rose gold help each other to the edibles in front of us. 

A raucous clanking sound make us turn our heads to me. We look at me with our uplifted, youthful angel-like eyes. The source of the sound invokes awe as well as disgust so intense we could all regurgitate our sweet honeyed insides all at once. My spoon lay there on the marble floor which not so long ago was a grass-like meadow. It lay in a grief of peculiar abandonment. I look up at us with a pleading, ingratiating look only to be met with terror. We know what’s coming next. We gawk at the center of the table; the ceramic kettle shakes turbulently waiting to burst. The huge spectator crawls up on the sky- The Eye, with its youthful eyes and lengthened lashes and its colorless iris. It goes around in circles as it finally stands above me. We turn our heads away from me- the traitor, the cause of incompetent betrayal on our conscience. The iris settles on me and turns red while the kettle keeps on violently shaking, spilling hot pink tea over everything around it. We look at myself as my hands turn from pale to an unthinkable color akin to wood, my eyes turn from blue to a dull brown, my blonde hair dipped in a horrifying black. We stare as lines although minute, form throughout my previously porcelain smooth skin. Our eyes red as a bunny looking cunningly upon the result. Soon I find my head aching in an excruciating agony as if it is being ripped apart from itself. We don’t think anymore for a second and then it stops. The pain, The thoughts... and I think now again with full capacity. My hands move towards my cup now covered in spilt tea. As I wrap my hands around the handle of the cup, I feel a tinge of electricity travel throughout my body in a hurried frenzy. The cup falls as I give out a screech and spill the tea. I start to swell, or perhaps grow, starting from my fingers. My body starts to grow and I can see the countenance of the others looking as if I’m the most appalling creature. The glance of myself, I catch at the spilt hallowed liquid looking as red as blood now petrifies me and I nauseate with repulse. I grow in places unknown and lose my likeliness to my others. The thought itself comforts me and frightens me at the same time. I am stripped off of my naivety, my innocence, the beauty of The Eye which causes a foreign emotion to crawl up my heart and sneak up to my head. Slowly the others, which look as tiny and innocent as children now vanish. I lose them in my own Fate because of itself. I lose ourselves and in this process of pernicious estrangement I lose myself too. The table, the lace, the pink and white, honey and cream all fade away in a vortex of dreams. I look up at the only thing my eyes can see now - The Eye, our mother, our God, our teacher, our Creator. As a single tear escapes her eyes, it falls on me as a sulfurous acid and melts my entire physical being away. 

I still hear the giggles, smell the sweet so intense I would physically churn, the pink and white so superficial I could barf. I look at the porcelain dolls of society created by the Creator and wish to be them but also wish not . To be or not to be? Who shall want to bear the constraint of being the first raindrop of change?

The title of the poem is a short reference to Edvard Munch's Puberty. There is a very overt contrast in the tones and hues used in this story and his painting.

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Written by Debopoma Bhattacharjee, a literature major and a budding writer trying to find a way to fit reading so many books from her TBR list into her schedule.

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