I’ve been told I have swagger and I can attribute that to a few factors, none of which being my teenage arrogance. My first shoutout goes to my occasionally held-back shoulders. All of my gratitude to them for flawlessly forming the illusion of knowing what to do.
The pep in my step, the inciter of my feet, are the yearbook notes from friends and teachers and the promise I made to myself of getting my name in front of their eyes again. No, no, no, I’m not scouring for attention or fame, I’m just the face in the background noise movie, sitting on a bed, looking starry-eyed out the window, about to break into song, dreaming of a way to make their name outside of this town.
Of course, my heartfelt thanks to my hometown, the shoes that housed my jammed toes and itched my increasingly blistered heels for twelve years of my life. My hometown: a hundred people in my grade. Bitter Facebook feuds. Pale, rural grass. Mandatory parade gatherings.
But truly, I think my boldness is the result of refusing to sit with the shards of stained glass at the bottom of my heart, with only the gladness of pinpointing a label for myself. Of refusing to let the statistics attached to the rarest lightrays of me keep me down. Yes, the pressure of trudging through a town, carrying exclamation points and warning posters of a world full of headlines is what stamped these circles under my eyes. The refusal to shrug it is what it is and simply allow the sun to never see any variation in its already-repetitive travels has dried my skin.
The groove of my stride is an eighth of the combined confidence of every mouthy soccer boy in my grade, and is the metronome to, therefore, every phrase out of my own mouth. Each stumble I take is well-earned, so try to get me to chuckle any more about my own downfall. Please try to get me to grin because I am my most avid critic. I examine each ridge on each of my screw-ups and rate them on a four-star scale, tears of frustration dotting my review with punctuation marks.
Yes, thank you, India, thank you, terror, thank you, disillusionment, for placing me here. Because what am I without minor delusion? And by that, I mean I am clinging to a strand of hope so thin that my fingernails are digging into my palms, because really, my blossoming conviction roots from frustration, so yes, thank you, frustration. I walk with sore feet and a scrunched grin and loose shoulders but I can assure you that’s nothing but the look of a motivated dreamer, tired of the smell of pale grass, of a wordy rarity who will never let anyone forget so, of a gracious revolutionary who has all the world to thank.