No longer eighteen

They said, growing up would be a trap you could fall into,

something you cannot get out of once you slip into it.

It isn't a flip of a coin you toss onto the air

and catch it on the palm of your hands like a resting butterfly catching its final breath,

like a caterpillar cocooned into its shell undergoing metamorphosis—growing up sneaks up to you whether you want it or not.

Growing up catches up to you on a random Tuesday,

Somewhere around the scorching heat waves of May; and all of a sudden it isn't entirely about you anymore.

You now hold your mother's grief onto the palm of your hands,

You now carry the anger of your sister's pent up rage over the years

for everything she could not have.

And now you wear an invisible armor just for her, just so you could protect her

from everything you could not protect yourself of back when you were sixteen;

Because the world got under your skin at sixteen and you let them,

you let them throw mud all over your face and bicker away their blames for you not being enough—you wandered about the maze made out of your own self-loathing guilt

for years until the truth appeared in front of you

one by one,

on a random Tuesday—welcome to the age you've been so desperately praying for,

to the age of making a difference instead of repeating the mistakes

your mother once made.

You are no longer the clown amusing their circus,

neither are you the puppet of their unfulfilling dreams and aspirations.

You are on your own now—as horrifying and liberating as it sounds.

Growing up never comes up to you with everything figured out in a perfect order, neither

with a survival kit and a manual that might be half-written in Chinese.

It catches up to you like a sudden instinct installing onto our brain; screaming,

"you must protect them now like the way you've always wanted to protect yourself — for everything you could not have for yourself,

for every blame that had been thrown at your face,

for every time you prayed that someone would protect you, that someone would rescue you,

you now wear the armor for them

like a necklace handed down from your mother,

a badge of strength handed down from her mother—but this time, it isn't the iron bars chaining you down to your feet, like the ways it chained onto your mother's bones,

but a crown resting onto your head—something you could hand down to your sister."

Growing up is an act of acceptance

of the battles you will win and lose; at the cost of protecting the ones you love.

And when something like that dawns upon you like catching up to a midnight dream

You know then and then

That you are no longer a girl of eighteen.

Maliha Tribhu is a writer, currently an undergraduate majoring in Marketing at the University of Dhaka.