I am seventeen years old.
I have been seventeen years old for exactly
six months,
five days.
I have been all of the ages before,
and I will be all of the ages ahead,
someday.
I think.
I hope.

I am seventeen years old,
but there are days when I feel the weight of the
particles
left over from the birth of this universe
settling into the porousness of my bones,
weighting me down by my marrow, leaving me
stuck with lead in my soul to forever drift the current of
“la vie quotidienne.”

I am seventeen years old
but some days I feel as old as time itself –
maybe because there are days when I have lamented
the fact that I have lived the years before
and recoiled from the idea of living all of the years
ahead;
these days have been all too frequent,
the scent of antiseptic and the feel of blurred eyes
all too familiar.

I am seventeen years old,
and feeling as old as time itself isn’t quite the curse
I imagined it to be.
It hurts, splinters me into shards sometimes, but the fact remains
that I wouldn’t know myself if I couldn’t look in
the mirror and see battle scars
in the depths of my irises and swords in the bloodshot veins
tracing through the whites of my eyes.

Seventeen years old is not the end of the world,
and nor was ten,
and nor will be twenty.
Embrace the before
and embrace the ahead,
and before you know it the strength will have built
your muscles so full that the lead in you
will become easier to haul,
turned to the silver lining of the bones now hollow
as a bird’s and
ready for flight.