Kayla Kavanagh (18)
An Art Most Dangerous
Recently, I found all the poetry I wrote when I was fifteen. I penned fifty-seven poems that year, 2014, which sounds impressive, except they’re all terrible. Tired metaphors about lavender sunsets, melodramatic rhyming couplets about ex-lovers avoiding eye contact in school hallways, and all of them in capital letters to achieve a tone of screaming because if you say something loud enough, attention must be paid to it. Amid all the cringe-worthy haikus and hyperboles, I stumbled upon a single salvageable line: “I am suffocating from the stagnancy of a million moments.” Reading that, I halted the harsh literary critique of my former self and recalled what it was like to actually be her.
I spent my adolescence in a constant state of yearning for the future. My life hinged upon two basic entities: home and school. Drives up and down the mile-long road that connected these two spots were occasionally peppered with detours—to frozen yogurt shops with friends, to sporting events in sweaty gyms a few towns over instead of the sweaty home gym—but my scope of the world was narrow, my existence simplistic, my legacy too easily erased entirely. Yes, I was suffocating: I was weighed down by the immensity and entropy of a world I couldn’t yet enter. I was standing at the gate, pawing the dirt, waking up every morning and waiting for my life to start.
If fifteen-year-old me had been suffocating from the stagnancy of it all, then seventeen-year-old me was just about breathless, slowed to a standstill by hometown monotony. I traded poetry for college applications, enraptured by the possibility of movement, of flight from my suburban labyrinth.
And then I left for good. Packed up the essential components of my identity—some of which had accumulated over the duration of a brief but budding lifetime, the rest of which had been purchased mere days ago from the local Bed Bath and Beyond—and left home without so much as a second thought. Looking back now, I kind of hate that seventeen-year-old, speeding away so flippantly, so confidently, from the only life she had ever known. I want to shake her and shout something along the lines of, “Repent! You’ve spent years resisting any semblance of familiarity; just admit you needed it! You relied on it! Your life was built upon it!” But I also understand that leaving was the only way she would learn she had needed or relied on anything, the only way she would acknowledge she had possessed a whole life from which she actively chose to depart.
The beginning of college was a montage of foreign experiences. I rode in a cab. I held crying friends at four o’clock in the morning. I attended parties, sometimes drinking, usually not. I spent a night beside a hospital bed. I spent an hour inside a boy’s bed. I gained fifteen pounds. I lost ten. I became keenly aware of my own youth, a potent collision of complete control and complete lack of control. I awoke each morning to a vibrant city beckoning me to consume it, inviting me to devour all that it offered. But a reminiscent loneliness underscored the dazzling skyline and followed me everywhere. My new, grandiose world was at times loud and elitist and one in which I didn’t belong. Different backdrop, same ache.
A few months ago, I returned home. All of my unfurling and expanding contrasts sharply against a town that has remained precisely the same in my absence. There is still space for me in the lives of all the people I left behind, but I am no longer the proper shape for it. I can’t seamlessly refill the gaps I’ve created.
It is only now, during a summer in which I belong to nothing and no one, in which I hover above my own life, detached from any singular point in space, that I’ve discovered I was wrong to blame my suffocation, my adolescent entrapment, on a specific geographical location. Adolescence by definition is entrapment; those terrible poems, those odes to being fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, would have brewed inside of me no matter where I went. I wish, on that day I left home, that I hadn’t so recklessly cast aside the tiny life I built there. The quotidian can be tiring, but when you need a rest, it kindly tucks you back into a bed you remember how to fall asleep in.
Maps are freckled with places like my hometown, places that have to stay the same simply so we can outgrow them. For me, this town was a springboard I used as a means for getting somewhere else. I wonder where my next springboard will be, whether I will outgrow another place before it outgrows me, whether humans actually require more than one springboard during the course of a life. If leaving and returning has done anything, it has revitalized my sense of wonder. I wonder if I will ever reoccupy the lives of the people I’ve known in the same capacity I once did, and how many more lives will open themselves up to me. But I know, with certainty, that I will no longer suffocate. There are a million moments, not to be stacked upon me without my say, but to be stirred by my body walking boldly through them.
Kayla Kavanagh is an eighteen-year-old from Connecticut. She studies English at Boston University.
An Art Most Dangerous
Recently, I found all the poetry I wrote when I was fifteen. I penned fifty-seven poems that year, 2014, which sounds impressive, except they’re all terrible. Tired metaphors about lavender sunsets, melodramatic rhyming couplets about ex-lovers avoiding eye contact in school hallways, and all of them in capital letters to achieve a tone of screaming because if you say something loud enough, attention must be paid to it. Amid all the cringe-worthy haikus and hyperboles, I stumbled upon a single salvageable line: “I am suffocating from the stagnancy of a million moments.” Reading that, I halted the harsh literary critique of my former self and recalled what it was like to actually be her.
I spent my adolescence in a constant state of yearning for the future. My life hinged upon two basic entities: home and school. Drives up and down the mile-long road that connected these two spots were occasionally peppered with detours—to frozen yogurt shops with friends, to sporting events in sweaty gyms a few towns over instead of the sweaty home gym—but my scope of the world was narrow, my existence simplistic, my legacy too easily erased entirely. Yes, I was suffocating: I was weighed down by the immensity and entropy of a world I couldn’t yet enter. I was standing at the gate, pawing the dirt, waking up every morning and waiting for my life to start.
If fifteen-year-old me had been suffocating from the stagnancy of it all, then seventeen-year-old me was just about breathless, slowed to a standstill by hometown monotony. I traded poetry for college applications, enraptured by the possibility of movement, of flight from my suburban labyrinth.
And then I left for good. Packed up the essential components of my identity—some of which had accumulated over the duration of a brief but budding lifetime, the rest of which had been purchased mere days ago from the local Bed Bath and Beyond—and left home without so much as a second thought. Looking back now, I kind of hate that seventeen-year-old, speeding away so flippantly, so confidently, from the only life she had ever known. I want to shake her and shout something along the lines of, “Repent! You’ve spent years resisting any semblance of familiarity; just admit you needed it! You relied on it! Your life was built upon it!” But I also understand that leaving was the only way she would learn she had needed or relied on anything, the only way she would acknowledge she had possessed a whole life from which she actively chose to depart.
The beginning of college was a montage of foreign experiences. I rode in a cab. I held crying friends at four o’clock in the morning. I attended parties, sometimes drinking, usually not. I spent a night beside a hospital bed. I spent an hour inside a boy’s bed. I gained fifteen pounds. I lost ten. I became keenly aware of my own youth, a potent collision of complete control and complete lack of control. I awoke each morning to a vibrant city beckoning me to consume it, inviting me to devour all that it offered. But a reminiscent loneliness underscored the dazzling skyline and followed me everywhere. My new, grandiose world was at times loud and elitist and one in which I didn’t belong. Different backdrop, same ache.
A few months ago, I returned home. All of my unfurling and expanding contrasts sharply against a town that has remained precisely the same in my absence. There is still space for me in the lives of all the people I left behind, but I am no longer the proper shape for it. I can’t seamlessly refill the gaps I’ve created.
It is only now, during a summer in which I belong to nothing and no one, in which I hover above my own life, detached from any singular point in space, that I’ve discovered I was wrong to blame my suffocation, my adolescent entrapment, on a specific geographical location. Adolescence by definition is entrapment; those terrible poems, those odes to being fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, would have brewed inside of me no matter where I went. I wish, on that day I left home, that I hadn’t so recklessly cast aside the tiny life I built there. The quotidian can be tiring, but when you need a rest, it kindly tucks you back into a bed you remember how to fall asleep in.
Maps are freckled with places like my hometown, places that have to stay the same simply so we can outgrow them. For me, this town was a springboard I used as a means for getting somewhere else. I wonder where my next springboard will be, whether I will outgrow another place before it outgrows me, whether humans actually require more than one springboard during the course of a life. If leaving and returning has done anything, it has revitalized my sense of wonder. I wonder if I will ever reoccupy the lives of the people I’ve known in the same capacity I once did, and how many more lives will open themselves up to me. But I know, with certainty, that I will no longer suffocate. There are a million moments, not to be stacked upon me without my say, but to be stirred by my body walking boldly through them.
Kayla Kavanagh is an eighteen-year-old from Connecticut. She studies English at Boston University.