Dear Lily

Dear Pubescent Me,

This is a sensitive topic, I know. I know how much pain and embarrassment it gives you. I know how you avert from peoples’ gazes, maintain distance, never keep your face still. Your hands gesture and distract—all to deter their eyes from lingering. They linger and they see. I won’t even name it, because naming it makes it real and forever, and you can’t fathom living with it forever. 

Sometimes, a week will go by and no one will have noticed. Your father is overseas again. You’re free, for now, from his blunt observations of the changes your body undergoes. As if you weren’t already aware. Constantly displaced, skin sticky and foreign, your growth betraying you. Sometimes, you feel good. When no one notices, you feel clean, proper. Like you were made correctly and there is nothing out of the ordinary. You could be every other girl. 

But a comment will arise—you know it always does—maybe small, off-hand, well-meaning even, and the illusion of its absence falls. Fast like your head has been struck, pummeling the blood to your feet. You’re cold again. If you could, you would step out of yourself, the cold alien film crumbling like a cloak. You think you would be used to it by now. The comments used to be bigger, pulsing with laughter, given dimension by pointed fingers. Always the boys on the playground, always there to correct you. They catch you every time, keep you silent and still, bound by what they think a girl should look like. You are made a spectacle. You’re one of the spectators yourself, shaking your head, mouth pinched in disgust.

I wish your mother could help you. She thinks you’re beautiful. She thinks it’s natural; in fact, she has it as well, a lot of women do. Hers is less visible than yours, but she can’t see that. She can’t see the laceration of words, feel the swell of their cruelty mounting on your young sense of self. I’m sorry you have to look for alternate ways to feel good. I won’t tell you they’re unhealthy or unsafe. I get it. You need some other pain to hold your attention, something louder, the searing fire which makes a promise to your body and your mind that you are in control, that you have the power to hurt, to direct the hurt, to accept the hurt.

I give you leave to remove it. Don’t be scared. You don’t know if you can, but you can, trust me. You’re worried people will notice. They’ll think they won. Worse, this act will represent a proclamation to yourself, once and for all, that you need to be corrected. 

It’s okay. Sometimes you need to feel like you fit in to a pre-established mold before you gain the stability, security, confidence, and desire to stand out. It’s okay. I’m okay. There are still occasions where I lose hours tunneling through the mirror, poking, squeezing, plucking. But there are also days where I am full of myself, bloat and hair and pimple scars. Nights where I go out, my face an artwork, sometimes obligatory, sometimes not. There are moments, weaved into weeks, months, years, when I take up space, eye circles skeletal dark, blood vessels burst like freckles. I call and my body, sweat pooling under glasses, dry skin flaking, answers. I consider how I want to look and how that supports or disrupts the image I am told to pursue. There are many like me, many unlike me. I have the power to age, to tire, to accept and enact change.

Lately, I forget it’s even there. I smile, I cry, I forget. I let it grow on my face, my legs, my armpits.

You’re disgusted, I know. That’s okay. If you were here with me or I were there with you, strangely possible when words collapse time, I’d fling up my arms, kick out my legs, puff out my cheeks, and dance a hairy dance for you until you keel over backwards and laugh yourself silly, your horror and shame making place for joy.

I wish you could see yourself the way I see you. You will.

-Lily Chang

Lily Chang is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Montréal, Québec. She is a graduate of Concordia University's MA program in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The City Series from Frog Hollow Press, Headlight Anthology, Dark Helix Ezine, and Immersion: An Asian Anthology of Love, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction. She is a finalist for the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2018 Diverse Writers Grant.