Earlier this year I somehow managed to tell the story to two of my classmates, while seated in a swinging lawn chair. I had my eyes on the checkered retractable awning the entire time, not because I would not look at them, but because looking straight in front of me meant coming face to face with my reflection in the glass-paneled doors. The confession was a failure; it left me feeling squalid and ruined, for reasons I will not go into here. I’d like to make clear that it wasn’t their fault, however. She was a darling slip of a girl, all flashing skirts and floral smile, a milder, kinder Lady Green Sleeves. He was a debonair Holmesian character, with an ancient, Romulus air and Roman profile to match. They were gentle with guilty, doleful me, but they were also unprepared.

Afterwards, I lost all sense of the story itself. Where had it began, where was the development, the character designs, the pacing? All the narrative elements that I’d so carefully picked up along the years felt artificial to the point of obscenity when placed against the backdrop of my mother’s relapse and my parent’s divorce. I found that the anger and weeping of those summer days had wiped out the details, leaving a muddled strip of brightly colored, bursting memories. There was that far-away sun, the ice cubes in my mother’s tropical drink, that pair of well-meaning but terrifying policemen (“don’t cry, you’ll get double the gifts on Christmas”). Humiliated, I found that I could no longer distinguish right and wrong in that mess. Where had my sense of justice gone? Where was I, all that time?

Often I was (and I still am) filled with sudden and powerful remorse. I couldn’t believe what a big deal I was making out of this, when in dim and dusty Africa children live and die in white refugee tents. I choked it down, and I tried my best to be good. That period taught me that I’d never possessed humility, and that even if I was not a true egotist, I had cut corners. I learned the pleasure of existing, and that home, and all the extensions of it (everywhere I stepped became home – school classrooms and warm bookstores, marble plazas and tree shadows) deserved genuine respect and admiration. I lost, for sure this time, my fear of associating with other teenagers, and I found that the grinning flashes and little peaks in their intonation, those indications of their goings-about, their evenings at the squash court, their exchanges of loving-constructed in-jokes, brought me joy.

I know I have not been an excellent daughter, sister, or friend. I have been distraught and sordid, but through all the ugly times and door slams I have stayed, if not strong, than at least firm. My one good quality, perseverance, has stuck by me, through, if you’ll permit me the small cliche, thick and thin. Though I am often unsure and confused, I don’t mind being proven wrong, I don’t mind a chiding “No, Emma, look here, it’s like this.”

But still I couldn’t find the sufficient courage to confide in someone. I wanted so badly just to have it be out there, not in written form but in spoken word, syllables leading to the sentences of my shame. I tried to imagine the prototype of the conversation, and each model I trashed as being too casual, too flighty, too stiff, too horrific. I have been accustomed, for as long as I have lived, to think through absolutely everything, which I now realize has caused me to miss out on the spontaneous memory-making of childhood. So when I spotted my school counselor at the reception area, speaking to the secretary, it was in the spirit of impulse and necessity (and a third thing, which started in the pit of my abdomen and exploded out my mouth) that I called out his name. It was with shock that I discovered that he recognized me, despite the fact that we’d spoken only twice, and with even greater shock I found myself asking for an appointment with him.

This leads me to the events of the past Friday. I sat in a straight-backed chair and talked, for almost two hours. He put in a word here and there, but mostly he smiled, hands cupping his face. My breaths were quick and raspy, and my fingers, curled in my lap, twitched and fussed. When I remember it now, I have to laugh at the pretty picture we made: a schoolgirl in sneakers pulling out her whole life story like colored scarves from a magician’s mouth, eyes running and darting, and a middle-aged man with a beatific expression and nodding head. The words, miraculously, did not fall apart under the pressure. I found the bravery of a literary ancestor; I spoke as though I were reading poetry.

At the end of it, my school counselor looked at me, not with pity, as I’d expected, but with something akin to wonder. He said to me, “Emma, you’ve been through a lot.” I’d never been told that before, and with a rush I realized that it was all I’d ever wanted. All I had ever wanted was that acknowledgement, that I had suffered, and that I had worked hard, to defeat something greater than myself. I was a child, looking for an approving tap on the head, any indication that I was doing okay. I came to terms, in an instant, with it all, and my life up until that moment unfolded before me, palpitating and beautiful, in the true sense of that word. He said it again: “You have been through a lot.” I told him, smiling: “No. I have been very happy.”

In the unrecognized micronation of Nounaim, the cat Xylem is something of a phenomenon. He travels on the underside of horse carriages, he feeds on children’s candies. All doors in Nounaim are built with compartments specifically for his use. All drainpipes are painted purple (a color he despises) so he will not, in a fit of disorientation, attempt to crawl into one. The cat Xylem is a lot of things, but he is not particularly slender.

The cat Xylem, despite his quick paws and careless stare, is not a free agent. The cat Xylem goes to wherever his paper collar indicates. It is always an address in Nounaim, printed in the Scientist Phloem’s neat small caps. 3 OSMOSIS STREET, that was the very first, a skinny panelled house sandwiched between the glossy pastel shingles of 2 and 4, belonging to Cambium.

(a brief tangent for the uninformed reader: Cambium, who in a daguerreotypes of old is a young lady of exceptional and expert grace and liveliness, a female to put even Parenchyma to shame, sending any fellow into fits of weeping at the very sight of her rainbow bow and ankle-length velvet skirts. Today, almost three hundred years after the cat Xylem’s visit, neither he nor she have aged visibly at all, but her rainbow bow lies shredded at the bottom of a landfill.)

Cambium had knelt before the cat Xylem, offering him first salami, then hunks of discolored bread, then a bowlful of milk (no? Are you minding your figure? Two percent fat, maybe?), until finally her butler Trichome (Stoma’s elder brother, taking up the mantle of Cambium’s care like a true lovelorn gentleman) had dropped half a sheet of drying salt water taffy into the cat Xylem’s maw. He had bent down and, pinching the edge of the paper collar, ripped off Cambium’s address. 3 OSMOSIS STREET crumpled up into his fist, revealing 6 PHOSPHATE DRIVE underneath. Thus began the cat Xylem’s love affair with sugar and his long voyage.

This summer, when I wrote my short story, I was extremely enamored of a certain phrase: “to seek, to strive, to find and not to yield.” A line from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and inscribed on the cairn of snow that marks RF Scott’s place of death. I think of Platyhelminthes, simple, dumb, uncomplicated flat worms composed of a one-two-three body structure and no heart nor lungs. Platyhelminthes, who, when cut in thirds, will regrow the parts they are missing, effectively becoming three organisms from one. Regenerating their heads, those stupid beasts, doing everything I cannot!

The other day on the radio I heard the song “Fire With Fire” by Scissor Sisters. I’d never heard it before, but it melded in with my state of mind and the landscape wonderfully. The twists and gurgles of far-away mountains, slate blue, shady but always new to my infant eyes. Fight fire with fire, fire with fire, fire with fire. Yes. Though not everything I have been doing has been going beautifully, I have weapons at my disposal, sheer gut and gumption, fiendish blaze curdling in my own metalworker’s stomach. I have reasons and mechanisms to ignite. Fire with fire.

Boy: Town hall square.

Em: But where in the square? North? South? East? West?

Boy: In front of the door.

Em: What door?

Boy: Below the balcony.

Em: What balcony?

Boy: Town hall’s!

Em: I thought we were meeting at the square. Now we’re meeting at town hall?

[no response]

Em: Please help me out here.

Boy: What’s the matter?

Em: Okay, please explain to me in simple terms where we are meeting.

Boy: Okay.

Em: Okay.

Boy: Town hall square.

OH GOOD GAD.

I am rather fond of the Computer Science attic. I chose Biology over Computer Science this year, so I don’t get to see much of it anymore. There are usually more computers than students, so the one at the back (which I call Ol’ Faithful or Ol’ Unfaithful depending on how fast it’s running that day) is pretty much reserved for me. Ol’ Faithful/Unfaithful is my favorite because, despite the cracked modem and the broken switch on the screen, the keyboard is in excellent shape. Shiny, black, rounded edges, a pleasing pop! when you press a key – it’s great stuff.

I don’t do any really productive work in the Computer Science attic. Since I finish off the projects assigned to me quickly, I spend the majority of the time browsing Wikipedia. Browsing Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. The endless trail of “See also” items! The little known facts of sushi, Fitzgerald and the sinking of the RMS Lusitania! The surprisingly useful trivia! The excerpts of doctoral theses, poetry anthologies and various books! The occasional literary gem! The satisfaction of editing a minor grammatical error on the History of Human Rights page! Wikipedia, like clean feet, shiny glass panes and almost perfectly round circles, makes me happy in a way that is difficult to explain to people. In fact, most things about me are difficult to explain to people.  Today, for example, I saw a poster some fifth-graders made about “The Little Prince”, which they credited to Antoine de Saint, who is actually named Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I don’t know why I reacted quite so vehemently to the exclusion of part of the author’s last name (I went as far as to stab the poster with the tip of my finger, quite irrational behavior indeed), but I do know it perplexed my conversational partner quite a bit.

This isn’t the only thing that seems to perplex. My voyages to the Computer Science attic confuse my fellow classmates as well. It’s been five years since the trips started, and still I’m confronted by kids asking what I’m doing there, either sheepishly or aggressively, never something in between. ”Well,” I usually say, “my English level is too high to be taking an English as a Foreign Language class, so I’m doing some work up here instead.” I’ve considered answering with something outrageous (“I’m filing the director’s tax returns!”), but considering that this is a school environment, and I have zero ability to pull off a convincing a sarcastic remark, that’s probably more trouble than it’s worth.

Other than these occasional questions, I don’t usually talk to the students I’m with in the Computer Science lab, though I know most of them by name. There’s a rather curious exception, however: when I walk in, and when I leave, a voice from somewhere in the mass rings out: “Buenos días, Emma” and “Adios, Emma”. I am pretty sure the person in question is male, and a bit younger than me, maybe by three or four years. I don’t know how he’s managed to remember my name, or how he’s concealing himself in the crowd so well. Must be magic.

In any case, now, when I enter and leave rooms, I hear “Buenos días, Emma” and “Adios, Emma” in my head. It makes me feel comfortable and well taken care of and just thoroughly at peace, like I’m zooming along on a convenient moving sidewalk, or levitating a few millimeters off the ground, or just generally acting like a happy, non-angsty teenager. I am not quite sure how a customary greeting/farewell cycle instigated this kind of emotional response, but hey, I’ve known for a while now that I do weird stuff, and said weird stuff doesn’t make my life any harder. Quite the contrary in fact, and I figure I might as well stick with stuff that works.

And that concludes today’s segment of THINGS EMMA WRITES ABOUT WHEN WHAT SHE REALLY WANTS TO DO IS MAKE DEVILED EGGS BUT THERE IS NO MAYONNAISE IN THE HOUSE.

For two hours, I entertained myself by collecting and color-coordinating pamphlets, filling in applications for a varied series of sweepstakes and classifying the free candies into groups according to taste, color, consistency and overall appearance. All in all, clearly an enriching experience.

Things I have wanted to do “when and if I grow up”: evolutionary psychology, biological anthropology, political science, economics, criminology, learn to properly justify Word documents without those yucky spaces in the middle of sentences.

HI! MY NAME IS EMMA! MY LIFE IS TOTALLY UNPLANNED (WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE FEW HANDWRITTEN SWOT ANALYSES MY FATHER HAS MADE FOR ME. NOTE THAT HERE, “FEW” MEANS “SEVERAL HUNDRED”.)

AND I HAVE NOT SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTED. LIFE IS OKAY. LIFE IS GLORIOUS.

Yes, that one, the one anyone with a soul screws up on the first try. I like the premise, but I am not quite sure why. Graphic puzzles involving repetitive motifs are somehow enjoyable to me. I think there is something very gratifying about the patterns. Patterns are pretty, because they are recurring and as such peaceful to the human eye, but they are not as safe as they seem. They multiply and evolve and build and live forever, like 1 divided by 81, which is admittedly an unaesthetic number, yes, but it’s lovely because it continues a connection, it never dies: 0.012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679…

Chemical elements and crystallography and bee hives and the Vitruvian Man are shapely and regular and as close to perfection as nature can get. There’s something alluring in patterns, in the similarity between the two halves of a woman’s face, in that repetition. Sometimes there’s infinity there too, shrugging a shoulder in a background, constructing circles of an infinite number of sides. There’s something scary in patterns, to me at least, something very unsettling.

I think I will write a Lovecraftian horror story someday, and it will be about how marvelous and simultaneously horrifying the symmetry and beauty of patterns can be. If you think about it, everything that’s wrong about the world started because something deviated from the norm, turning the regular march of a pattern into a genocide. If you think about it, everything that’s right about the world started because something deviated from the norm, turning the regular march of a pattern into a revolution. I would like to know how these things happen, but I know I cannot. There comes a point where you cannot walk anymore. You bump against the walls of the world’s soft amniotic sac and you cannot do much more. Insurgents may cry, pressing the curlicues of their thumb prints into definite borders, wanting the space behind and in front and above and below and everywhere in between, the galaxy of things we cannot explain, the galaxy of things that don’t want to be explained. But we can’t guard over the creation of a nebula, or the coding of the proteins of an unborn human, these branching structures fracturing from the embryonic tree, the apex of a flower extending and and slicing and moving into a realm away from us, and the security of a pattern.

I’m re-reading what I’ve been writing and, to be honest, it’s pretty baffling. EMMA IT HAS NEVER BEEN MORE OBVIOUS TO THE INTERNET THAT YOU ARE MENSTRUATING.

I find it difficult to compromise the different concepts of the human being evolution has deemed we become and the human being the modern world insists we are. Yes, I am the kind of person who asks these questions. My teachers routinely look at me and go NO EMMA METAPHYSICS IS NOT THE ANSWER.

I think that because certain events in my life have always been a little difficult to understand, turning to the reasoning in scientific texts and the austerity of explainable phenomena has helped me come to terms with my feelings. I can make stalwart little buildings with color-alternating Legos.

I feel sick today.

It’s nothing glamorous. Elbow on desk, cheek in hand, books splayed and sweater discarded on floor, as it never stays long enough on the backs of these chairs. Long-legged boys can’t fit in desks. When I stretch, tucking my feet behind me, it is their not-apologetic, too-big shoes I crash into. The system and I are uneasy together, but we get along. I am non-existent in class, a non-revolutionary. We are drawn in by desire, affirmations of adulthood that get us through eight hours of government issued learning. Teenagers are naturally set to unhappy, or what they term as unhappiness. I am girl in economic terms, and it puzzles me that no matter how much I reassemble or rearrange there is not enough resources to help these little humanoids into satisfaction.

I have not quite finished puberty. I’m, we’re all still so awkward. We haven’t come to a consensus yet, we’re still uncomfortable with shhsexualityshh, but we are somehow snapping, somehow growing bold. My bones have matured and slipped into final resting positions, but my brain has yet to sort out the rational from the irrational, has yet to evolve to a point society will deem acceptable. What will I think then, when I am older and the paths of my neurons have grown to encompass hundreds of thousands of miles? Many things, maybe, if I am lucky. Perhaps I will be a little less stubborn, a little more sympathetic, but most of me is already unfixable, for better or worse. I know I can’t be separated into primitive pieces and made into a better person, and I think, what’s so very wrong with that?

I am girl who is not much, really. Look here, it’s true. I am girl trying to memorize dates for Spanish civil wars, forgetting that jacket on the coldest day of the year, listening to twee music in dingy headphones. I am a middle class fifteen year old at the national average for weight and height, girl indistinguishable in yearbook photos, in crowds, girl bumping into doorstops and the recipient of hearty bless you‘s when sneezing into elbows. But there is something different about me, something maybe no one knows. It’s simple, it’s downright stupid, and I don’t know how to define it, how to say it without feeling guilty, without negative connotations.

I am happy, dear God, I am happy, I am happy. There’s nothing wrong. I don’t need to be prettier, skinnier, taller, okay? I don’t need a boyfriend, walls painted sage green, miniskirts in different cuts and colors, is that alright? I don’t need to complain about the concerns of my neatly-ordered, clean-cut mornings and afternoons and evenings and nights. I could always be doing better, but I am okay now. Is there something wrong with me, something faulty in the part of me that’s supposed to disapprove, is supposed to be swollen with hormones and oh-so-righteously indignant? I really don’t know, and I really don’t care. All I know is that I am happy, I am happy always, and that is more than enough for me.

It’s not so bad, being young/old. Youngishly old? Oldly young? Sure, I can’t quite get Alex to knit me an afghan or make me oatmeal, and nor can I insist he put his stuff on the lower shelves of the hall closet because I’m too old to bend down, but there’s a great amount of satisfaction in preaching about THE GOOD OLD DAYS. I feel like something out of an 80′s sitcom, and it is not a bad feeling.

I have decided I will not be a lovable old person. I will yell at kids to get off my lawn, I will own several fat cats. I will fill the block with my renditions of progressive rock songs.

No, I may not be a lovable old person, but I will be a happy one. Even the bad old days become good in their re-telling.