mind over matter: an ode to fourteen, the living person whose soul had intertwined with my own.

by anya rania

I’d like to rewind to where it all began—when the words “Happy birthday!” rang in my ears at 12 o’clock midnight, as they were the words that celebrated the beginning of my relationship with fourteen, words that were meant to be congratulatory and heartwarming, I suppose. If I had known that they were words in disguise of a soon-to-be disaster, I wouldn’t have said my thank yous. 

Fourteen had welcomed me with open arms. They felt familiar, perhaps like the ones thirteen had. Its charm and fragility reminded me of twelve, and maybe eleven. To be honest with you, I barely remember them anyway, but fourteen was a firm believer in the magic of new beginnings—and this was my new beginning. 

It was something of a double-edged sword. At times I would feel like I’d taken one step forward and two steps backward. For a moment, I would feel like I was at the top of the world, then the next thing I knew, I had hit rock bottom. Soon enough, the mask came off, the show ended, and true colors began to show. Fourteen became the person I feared the most. 

Sometimes, I’m afraid. I’m afraid to share pieces of myself with fourteen whilst already feeling so much angst, insecurity, uncertainty—you name it. I’m afraid to meet fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and so on until I’ve surpassed the ability to know these years as a teenager and be introduced to adulthood. I’m afraid that maturity isn’t something that greets you with a welcome mat by suddenly having it all together. I’m afraid because I don’t know whether to claim this world as mine or to treat it as a temporary setting of what’s to come. And most of all, I’m afraid because fourteen has taught me more than anyone else has, being torn between whether to love or hate it. 

Fourteen once told me, you are bigger than what is making you anxious, when the same fourteen had been the cause for all that is making me anxious to begin with. How can you cause someone's heartache and still be the cure to it? You were a needle that birthed a puncture wound on my skin yet stitched it back together. Fourteen was all I had on some nights, reminding me that all of this is temporary, that I won’t be feeling like a burdening teenager forever.

I couldn’t walk away from fourteen. I couldn’t help but demonize it, when I should have tried to understand it, nurture it and celebrate it. God, why did I even settle for a relationship that wouldn’t let me be myself? 

During this year, I still ran to my mother when my anxiety was kicking in, I felt like the world was against me. I couldn’t show overflowing despair at funerals or losing a so-called friend who spoke about me behind my back—my emotions are replaced by rationality when I come across stressful circumstances—though I still laugh at my own bad puns. I was able to start making up my mind about several important aspects, deciding what I agree with my parents on, and what I don’t even if I haven’t experienced all of life just yet. Is fourteen constraining me from my desire to be able to feel more?

I had so much that I wanted to do and accomplish but couldn’t because of fourteen. 

Am I controlling fourteen or is fourteen controlling me? Am I seeing them for who they really are, or for their potential of who they could possibly be? 

Am I supposed to treat fourteen as the peak of my teenage years or simply as another chapter to prepare myself for the rest of it? I don’t know if I’m treating fourteen right, perhaps taking it too far for a year that’ll only be a distant memory in my subconscious. The moment I realized fourteen and I had different intentions—even if both were good ones—was the day I started to save myself. I couldn’t save fourteen by letting them destroy me.

Fourteen had filled my hands with empty promises and mouthful of lies, until they started to become full. There’s a free room and it’s there, between my fingers, that only needs a strong soul and a grip that can endure the remaining years. Trust me, I’ve said countless times that I was satisfied this year, until I realized my words were not my own. Heading towards fifteen, I felt like a wolf chewing its leg off to escape a steel trap. I thought I had it all with fourteen, but I didn’t. 

I had so much left unsaid, though I constantly reminded myself that there is still so much of the world I have yet to explore, waiting for me at its gates. 

To fourteen, I have grown to appreciate you as your own person rather than as mine. I have accepted the fact that you were a step in the process of becoming whole with myself. I have come to realize that I controlled fourteen, the same way fourteen controlled me. 

This’ll be over soon, I thought to myself. If I had learned anything for the past year, it’d be that age is more than just a number, after all. 

You moved me even though you were only a lone wing, unable to take flight. You became a part of me that I invisibly carried with a powerful connotation. Those around me started saying, “Are you fourteen?” or, “I didn’t know you were fourteen,” as if my own name was no longer the unequivocal nature of my being. Instead it was you. You weighed so vastly on my shoulders that people saw me as you. 

Fourteen wasn’t the one who caught me when I was falling, or the one who stitched me back together—it was me. I never lost you, I searched for you everywhere except the one place I was afraid of and never dared to; myself. You resided at the time my lungs filled a bit deeper and my heart beat a little steadier. I realized that I was the source of all your strength. That I was—and had always been—fourteen.