She'll Be the Best You Ever Had if You Let Her
You can’t even imagine the things that are going to happen to you.
Here’s a group of four teenage girls having a picnic at the park. They are all wearing earth-toned clothing; their hair is up: ponytails, half-ponies, a long, thick braid. One of them is sharing a secret; I can tell from the shape of her shoulders, caving down onto her chest, and the shape of the other girls’ shoulders, all pointed toward her. It’s just some weekday afternoon, but there is nothing casual about any of them. Whatever they’re dealing with is serious, and it’s happening now, and so must be dealt with now, because the fear — every teenager’s fear from what I can remember — is that some mistake now will define them forever. That’s true and it’s false, but how do you tell that to a teenager, how do you tell that to anyone? Time dilates as I let my dog sniff near their blanket; I want to eavesdrop but don’t. They look up at me from their blanket near a tree, or maybe they’re looking at my dog. My eyes land elsewhere; I don’t want to intrude. I keep walking.
Here’s another teenage girl, sitting in front of me on the train. I can only see the side of her face, an earring hanging from her left ear: a long silver wire with a black square bead dangling from its end. I can’t see her face, the bottom half of it covered by a mask, the top half by long bangs and dark-rimmed glasses, its general shape and size obscured by a phone in her hand, right thumb tapping the screen again and again, left thumb slipped under the mask and wedged between front teeth, front teeth biting left thumbnail. I did not have a cell phone as a teenager so am unfamiliar with this particular brand of frenetic texting, but I do know what it’s like to believe you can control the outcome of something if you just say the right thing. I want to put my hand on her shoulder, I want to say, you can just not do this, you can let it go, you can’t even imagine the things that are going to happen to you. I do not put my hand on her shoulder. I do not say anything. I look out the window; I listen to Phoebe Bridgers’s “Waiting Room,” which makes me remember what it was like to be fifteen.
Here’s yet another one, sitting on an incline at the park, looking down at a friend on a small blanket, or maybe it’s a folded-up sweatshirt. She’s crying, no words coming out of her mouth other than blubbery, desperate I don’t know’s. I wonder what’s happened to her as I walk past with my dog, the seconds it takes for her to exit my view expanding enough for me to realize that not only is there no way for me to know why she’s crying, there are also hundreds of possibilities. This girl, this person, is a world unto herself. I could stop to tell her it’s going to be okay; people passing by do that. (Someone did that for me the other day, actually. I was crying on the sidewalk and a guy driving a truck looked at me and said “Hey, awww, it’s going to be fine!”) In the grand sense of things it’s mostly likely true, but in the specific sense of things it just might not be. And in any case the average teenager has not experienced things going from not-okay to okay enough times to know that it’s the most likely outcome. I want to slip a don’t worry between her I don’t know’s. I want to say, Life is going to keep happening to you. You don’t have to know anything but how to let it.
I don’t say it. I don’t say anything. I am not a teenage girl, after all. I have learned by now that I can’t control the outcome of anything by just saying the right thing.