It’s easy to see it in the young: The growing of the inside pushing at the outside until it can’t push any more at chubby cheeks blown up with knowing. Puberty is a shedding of the shell that can no longer adjust, that snaps and splits in explosive bursting of seams overnight.
What steps out is rounded handfuls and lipsticked pouts, or hairy and lumbering with highwater pants. This new version is planned out with plenty of empty space inside–in the brain, in the heart–to expand, while the skin stretches slowly to keep it all in. Sometimes the steam builds, and faucets are vented; sometimes it rattles the mind.
Soon there are things other than lipstick and ME; things that adhere themselves in symbiotic embrace. Striped ties and children, houses like bras, friendships that travel in internet space, jobs that are ladders to clouds.
All that is stored in the pulsating mass is knowledge that knows how and when. It knows, too, when to unbutton the top of one’s head, and fly out the hole, or crawl from a danger, to dry off and flex in the new space and time.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology