Make-Up, Ice Cream, Underwear

I’d have been the world’s greatest teenage girl. I’m certain of it. I would’ve invited my friends—Anna, Laura, Thu—and we’d have done that thing where you cake makeup on your face at midnight and eat ice cream straight from the container and laugh at how much better you are than the boys at football. The kind of night where nothing happens and everything matters.

There’s something in me that watches teenage girls do this and feels a clean, uncomplicated envy. Not just for the freedom—though that’s part of it—but for the feeling of it. The texture of the friendship. The permission to exist inside something that small and precious.

Sure, I was born with a cock, and that comes with advantages. You move through the world differently. Socially, sexually, in obvious ways. But I’d still feel strange calling Janos and Ming-Lee and Paulchen over to drink white wine and laugh while we stuck glitter stickers on each other’s chests. There’s something I don’t get to have. Something I’ll never know.

Rebekah Campbell made a short film called Teenage Girl—just girls without limbs, moving through a space with whatever bodies and imaginations they had left. And that was enough for them. That was everything. That was the thing that broke me a little when I watched it.

Anna, Laura, Thu—if you’re real somewhere, I hope you knew what you had. I would’ve been the best version of myself with you. I’m absolutely certain of it.