my adolescent years were very dull. it was an all-girls school, so there was nothing much in the way of teenage romance or thrill. i remember my itchy uniform, white shirt, navy trousers, maroon jumper. clunky doc martens and my ugly grebo haircut, shaved at the sides, 4 non blondes blasting through my earphones as i slogged my way to school each morning.
barely paying attention in physics classes, scribbling in the margins of my exercise book. listening to the soothing drone of my geriatric latin teacher dictating a paragraph for us to translate, wracking my brain to remember the right verbs. hiding underneath the stairs in the tower block during lunch break, writing in my diary about all the things that troubled me. blue biro staining my hand. tensing up at the sound of footsteps approaching. walking the mile in PE, my beat-up white nikes dragging across the gravel of the track.
going home and rotting in front of my computer, or on the living room floor with my guitar, trying to learn the chords to whatever song i liked best. sitting on the sofa after dinner with a copy of bertrand russell's 'problems of philosophy', trying to understand his word salad. but i don't understand it.
looking at my reflection in the school's bathroom mirrors. seeing it multiply endlessly into that weird sickly shade of green that mirrors turn into when they're parallel to each other. ripping off a hangnail. scraping my hair back with gel and mousse, as if it made me look smarter. it didn't.
and just before the GCSE exams came up. shaving it all off in the kitchen, watching the straggly brown locks fall onto the linoleum floor. running a hand over my head. and how it felt like velvet. the deputy head will be fuming when she sees what i've done! shaved heads aren't allowed. but i have to do my exams, don't i?
i don't miss those days very much, if at all. but if i could meet that version of myself again, i'd tell her to cherish every moment, because there's a tiny part of my current self that finds comfort in those memories. i don't lose myself in those memories. but sometimes i wander around them like a museum exhibit and smile when i see them. and that spotty-faced teenage dyke, with her shaved head and crooked teeth and untucked school shirt, she'd probably be quite happy with how i've turned out.