A Week Alone Abroad
I spend my life mimicking people. And coming up with poetic first sentences.
I see how people walk fast or stressed on the street and sit preoccupied or uninterested on the metro. Like they have bigger things to worry about. Getting older is realizing that, lol duh, they do. It’s also probably not using “lol duh” in sentences anymore.
Two older women were sitting in front of me on the metro today as I was on my way to Plaça Catalunya, with the sole plan of wandering aimlessly until something genius or wonderful descended upon me. They matched in black rain jackets devoid of detail or purpose in Barcelona, repping the brand name Tenson just above their hearts. They looked sluggish, lifeless almost, except for the exchange of a few German words here and there. Eyelids drooping low, heads bobbing to the rhythm of the track at exactly the same pace. Boredom on the verge of sleepdom. Through the way they interacted – inquiring, reassuring, inquiring, reassuring – I sensed they were mother and daughter. It confused me for a moment, because both looked aged. I remember what a shock that revelation first gave me, a while ago now, that a daughter could be an adult. The round chins suspended in air for a moment, before a bump that sent them lolling back down to earth. German women cloaked in tension relax on the Spanish metro.
I copy the walking people and the metro people, because I am a daughter but I don’t yet feel like an adult. You can spot it from a mile away, my coming-of-ageness, from the janky converse to the septum piercing to the thrifted leather bag. My computer tabs list off: Mankiw’s Ninth Edition Macroeconomics textbook, seven Linkedin, three Indeed, five Handshake, one Instagram because I deleted it off my phone (for the hour), and two Google Docs to write shit like this. Not as romantic as a pen and paper. When I first started college, my mom bought me a nice, large green Kate Spade bag to carry around my laptop and all its heavy tabs.“Well every woman needs a good purse,” she said, chucking my Kånken to the side. Us girls, us women, we graduate from carrying things on our back to carrying them on our shoulders and eventually on our hips. My mom did the same for my sister, but at the end of college rather than at the beginning, and the bag was purple. Our generation does everything earlier. We knew things earlier. What will even become of the iPad kids and the TikTok tweens?
Before going out at night with girlfriends, still hoping for something genius or wonderful but with some degree lower expectations from a nightclub, I sit in front of the mirror trying on different shoes for thirty minutes. My friends click-clack through the apartment eagerly, wrapped from the bottom up in heels and sparkly dresses like pretty presents waiting to be noticed, to be admired, before being torn apart. I get the urge to mimic once again. But I can’t do it. It feels so unnatural and stupid, like a kid playing dress-up. A twenty year-old daughter. Double-decades of double-digits should mark me deserving of heels, right? Yet I watch the girls my age stumble around on uneven cobblestones, and surprisingly just as fatal asphalt streets, knees tweaking at every step, legs in zebra miniskirts leaving zigzag trails across the zebra crosswalks. I hold their hands, steadying them, stable in my maybe equally as stupid converse. And I realize then, it seems they are mimicking too, I suppose we all are, until one day something clicks and we wake up and we are grown.
