that's teenage rebellion for you
Khai Lynn
[TRIGGER WARNINGS] Death, apocalyptic themes, dysfunctional family dynamics
It begins like this: you cut your hair, leaving it jagged and choppy, and it makes you look like a boy but you’re done listening to other people. You look up temporary hair dyes and curse your black hair but you buy the nicest one you can find anyway, just in time for the last day of freedom you’re getting- it turns out a nice shade of violet and it makes you feel different in such a good way. You’re so done with what society wants you to be. You’re so done with family and obligations and duty. So you cut your hair short, you dye it bright, you learn how to live in your own body.
(You wash out the hair dye in time for school, but you don’t grow out your hair.)
It begins like this: you are in control.
It begins like this: the end of the world is coming and people do stupid things when the world is ending. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s close. It’s a glancing blow off the surface of the Earth, although you don’t know that until after you open your eyes and realise your hair is still violet.
When choice is taken from you, you make your own.
--
Actually, that’s a lie. It begins long before that.
Imagine, if you will, the sun rising for the first time in who knows how long. The world has been spinning round and round and somehow managed not to see the sun. Your world has been illuminated by neon lights and blinding glares and the glint of the sparkle off someone’s teeth, flaring a grin through the shadows. Somewhere high in the sky a bird is flying over the sun, its wings half-burnt but not like Icarus. Birds know where they’re going. Birds are born to fly.
Humanity doesn’t know what’s happening when the sun doesn’t rise the first day; we are not made for unexpected situations, after all. But we strive, we develop, we discover. For your part, you are just a child. The only thing you know about the eternal sunset is that it is all you have ever known. Parents let their children out late because who cares? It’s always dark. Just the same old flame-burning orange licking at the sides of the sky, never fading, never going stronger. The moon is always up. There’s an old Chinese legend, about the moon goddess Chang-E, who swallowed the pill of immortality to stop her tyrant husband Hou Yi from taking it, cursing herself to a life on the moon. You wonder what she would think of this.
Chang-E loved Hou Yi but she understood his flaws. Love eventually leads to sacrifice. Love eventually turns sour. Is this the meaning that those elders, so long ago, wanted people to take away?
Maybe her sacrifice was all for naught, anyway, because even if Hou Yi is not the one destroying the world it is still on fire. Nine suns, shot down by Hou Yi, taking their revenge.
But you are alive, alive, alive, at the very least it is not the end. Not yet. Not yet.
In this apocalyptic six months, you learn freedom. Freedom is not something that goes away easily. It sticks in your throat and forces itself into your stomach, where food has never and will never be enough to satiate you. Freedom is air thick with the stench of death looming in the air. As a child, you don’t understand death. Just that all the adults have such tired looks on their faces, that they’re working to the bone while you laugh and play and dance with the flickering lights. Years later, this is what you remember: laughter. Joy. There is no need for boundaries when you are the boundary. The only limit is imagination. And children born in your time, they are all so very limitless.
It is not easy to survive an apocalypse. It is not easy to look out of your window and not ever feel the sun smiling back down at you. But the children, at least, manage just fine.
Children with candy hearts and bleeding hands and so, so much to give, children who learned love at the knee of a dying world. One last hurrah. There is something to be said about this generation having something a little bit wrong about them. Everyone is a little bit off in the head.
Hunger. Desire. Want. Time is a social construct anyway but when you don't have it you have to replace it, no one wants to die young; no one wants to live empty. Limitless only means more to fill.
There's an intersection, somewhere, between this and love and Chang-E's story. You want and want and want and your sugar-spun heart is fragile enough to take and take and take. You turn old enough to fall in love, young enough to break your heart. Where other people drown in money and grow drunk on power, children fall in love. Again, and again, and again. Chang-E loved the wrong person. Your generation loves the wrong way. In the end there is not much difference, because everyone is still tearing each other apart.
You love. There is someone, once, who is pretty and distant and smiles like the sun. The first person who ever breaks your heart. You don't tell your parents. You don't tell anyone, because this in itself is so horrifically, terribly wrong that it could break your heart, all over again. You learn: this is a story about insight, eyes and what they cannot see, letting someone open up your chest and stare into your soul, doing the same in return.
You hear, one night, that you'd look nice with short hair, or coloured hair. But you're sleep-dazed, just a little too over the edge to care. Just conscious enough to know someone is here with you, to grab the hand on yours with such ferocity, such desperation, that it leaves a bloody mark.
Maybe the children are not alright. Maybe. But you can pretend, can't you?
This is the first trial. It is not the last.
When the sun rises, the whole world breathes a sigh of relief. Except, it seems, for you. You look out of your window and straight at the sun. When your eyes start to burn, you look away.
This is sunlight and sunlight is not always kind.
--
The world does not go straight back to normal, but it tries its best. Businesses open. Adults go straight back to the office. Schools let their students in, ready to educate, ready to work and direct. The school uniform you bought doesn’t really fit anymore, six months of disuse shrinking it. Or maybe you’ve grown. Lately it seems like you’ve been stuck in time, stuck with the not-light and the golden dawn of the first sunrise in a long, long time.
(No one ever finds out what caused it.)
The problem is simple. When choice is taken from you, you make your own. That is a lesson the world learned, under the threat of desolation. The world chose to survive. The problem is: now choice has been given back. So how can anyone continue to make their own meaning? When it has so clearly been drawn out for them?
You know it was called the apocalypse for a reason. That it was terrifying, that people wrote their wills, that people thought they were going to die. But you only ever saw those six months as a breath of fresh air. Funny, when the air was weighed down with the pain of everyone else.
Funny, when your heart is shattered at someone else's feet. But that's besides the point-
(-is it really? When your parents still don't know? When they would never have let you in this new world? When you thought that you could have been something more, if it had gone right, that you could have been a little more complete. Love is a choice. Love is- it's yours. This is yours. It was yours-)
-it was still blindingly, dizzyingly freeing.
And yet. The world is forced back into some semblance of order. Your parents don’t let you out of the house unless you have a reason. Your parents grow overbearingly worried about every single thing you do. This is what it was like, you know, before it happened- you are not so old as to not remember that. You remember very well the scoldings, the control, the security you had in a routine. It itches under your skin, like something is making its way through you; some malicious agent that just wants you to snap, to be angry. It itches like the sun burns at your skin as you walk. It is so horrible to be put back into a place when you have forgotten what that place is.
Your hands itch for something to laugh at. Children’s courage is the best in the world, all shiny and new and raw enough to rip and tear and still mend again. Only children ever laughed in the dark. Only children ever dared to give anything to a world that had nothing to give back.
Are you not a child anymore?
Your parents are starting to- well, not hate. They could never hate their child, could they? But drift away from you and from your coping, from your not-quite-child problems that can’t compare to their being thrown back into life.
You miss the apocalypse. Your parents were easier to talk to during the apocalypse. Maybe you just grew up, like anyone else would have. Maybe this is part and parcel of it all, an experience that is essential to life. The point is, you are not enjoying it. You smile and your teeth are just a little bit too crooked for light to shine off them. You look at the moon and you learn that it is only enabled by the sun. Such beauty, so dependent on something that only seeks to burn and blind and batter at spirits. The moon is not quite as bright, and when you look at it you can pretend the creeping colours of the sky are always going to be there. Like they are not being overshadowed every single day.
No one appreciates the sky. You go into photography to document it, but somehow it’s never really enough. You miss the old days when the sky was always there. Now it’s only truly there when you’re already asleep, thinking about it in your dreams.
Chang-E, up on the moon, she must be lonely. She's worshipped one day a year, on the Mid-Autumn festival, but- last year there was no Mid-Autumn Festival to speak of, under the darkness, and you'd forgotten. Nearly everyone had.
The next Mid-Autumn Festival is in six months. The Wikipedia article says it's meant to represent gathering, and thanksgiving, but here you are in your moonlit room. Apologising. Mourning.
The moon is the only thing that has stayed. Everything else is melting away into something new, something foreign, something not quite right.
Or maybe, you think, you're the one changing.
All this is just. Structure, order, clean black and white. And you should be used to this, to the endless, leeching dark, but you were looking for- colour.
For something to care about. To care, at all.
What is there to care for here? When there are no more people who look like the sun, because the sun has come back; when you're trapped in your own mind, in your own body. Nothing. Nothing.
Chang-E would look like that, you decide, the one who broke your heart- loving the wrong person, loving the wrong way, there's no difference at all. There is something wrong with you. You know this. You just wish it wasn't the one thing that you want to care for.
--
At some point the freedom filling your stomach drains away. Now you just feel empty, empty, empty- it’s always so cold, even in the sunlight. You’re always hungry but never full. You think, maybe falling in love would solve this, because love and choice are starting to become synonymous in your head- love is choosing over and over and over again. Who to love. How to love. It’s all about the agency. The way love melts like neon lights in your mouth.
You fight to prove that you can love. In all the right ways. But everyone’s definition of right ways is different and your parents hate you, really this time, because you’ve messed up. You don’t work well with limits. You always manage to spill over, to overflow with emotion. It’s a habit; where something is empty something else must be completely, embarrassingly full. Your stomach growls. Your heart bursts.
It is not a good substitute.
It’s all about- consumption, at the end of the day. Does food fill that hole? Does love? Maybe so, and maybe not. The only thing you control is your body. The only thing you can shape is yourself. You make yourself very small, and then very strong, and then you collapse because you’re so tired. Of it all.
It becomes about looking pretty. You make yourself, you have to make yourself well, right? You stretch and run under the disapproving glare of the sun and the moon but it’s okay, your parents don’t know, no one will know. How you’ve looked at yourself and thought: this isn’t enough. Thought: if I make myself this is not who I want to be. You are a stranger in your own skin. You don’t recognise yourself. Defiant, angry, trying to be beautiful. This is not you. This is someone else entirely.
Someone with fire instead of blood and glass instead of teeth and rising sun instead of tears. You are igniting. You are becoming something new.
Maybe that's a good thing but you don’t know, you don’t know, you hate not knowing. It’s one of your greatest flaws. Under it all, you’re still so painfully human.
At least you’re feeling something. At least your stomach is full again. Not with freedom, but with something like it. Not with freedom, but with everything you’ve been able to choke down.
It’s freedom but in an unbelievably messed up way. You admit that to yourself, in the nights where your stomach hurts and doesn’t stop hurting. It’s freedom, but at a cost you’re too scared to ask.
But what else can you do? At least you’re not hungry anymore. At least happiness doesn’t seem so far away.
(It's killing you. It's killing you. The weight of what-must-not-be and what-should-have-been on your shoulders. In the world before the sun disappeared, there were people with your problems, with your need to be pretty and to be loved and to fit in. But did it feel like this?)
--
The second apocalypse is announced on your birthday. The comet is set to hit Earth, you learn over breakfast. The next great extinction, this time for humanity too. You don’t celebrate. You smile, wide and crooked. The light does glint off your teeth, no matter how dim.
Your parents stop asking where you’re going after school. Enjoy yourself, they say. Live a little. (Live while you still can, they don’t say, but you hear it loud and clear.) The next time you leave your house you kiss a boy and you break a heart and he tells you abruptly, in the aftermath, that he’s flying away.
“Flying for the Moon,” he laughs, cynical. “Like that’ll save us. But what can I do? My parents insist.”
“Chang-E flew to the Moon,” you recall, “to escape Hou Yi, who had grown too much for her to handle. Love is twisted. Love makes the wrong choices sometimes." Pause. "If you meet her, you have to tell me. If you remember."
“I promise,” the mystery boy says. “I promise.” You’re both too old for promises. That doesn’t stop him, or you.
"I'm sorry," you offer. "About all this."
"We are all slaves to want," he shrugs. The end of the world brings out these things. Truths, bitter and angry and painful. Honesty, too sincere to bear. Insights into the things that matter most.
(For the first time, or the second, you are allowed to see yourself.)
When he leaves, you don’t cry.
The schools shut again. That’s what you’re most upset about, really. You walk through the streets and fall in love with every stranger you meet. Funny how you’ll die so soon and yet you’ve never felt more alive.
Is this what apocalypses do?
You just want it to stay this way. Suspend yourself in time. Run freely, be who you are, live like there’s no tomorrow. Make your own future. Make your own fears and regrets and dislikes. Make everything, good and bad.
All you have ever wanted is to choose. To choose how you look, how you live, how you love. To go back to the time when you were a child raised into a dying world, holding someone's hand till it bled, snatching their words and keeping them in the darkest corners of your mind, not letting them out.
Until- well. Today is as good a day as any. Once upon a time, there was a girl, and there was you, and there were words.
And words are worth nothing unless you bare your soul and take them to your heart, drink them in like a dying man in a desert who has found an oasis.
The only thing you control is your body, and the world does not let you forget this, but you won't let this one precious thing go. Your parents side-eye you when you tell them I’m cutting my hair. Your mother comes with you to tell the hairdresser: don’t make her look like a boy. You do it anyway, sitting on the floor of your bathroom, scissors in hand. Looking beautiful. Looking like you want to be this person you’ve found yourself becoming. It is so wonderful to be free. It is so wonderful to know that whatever you do, you will not be stopped by anyone else. The world is ending. No one has time to care about you.
The violet hair dye happens one day before the world is scheduled to end, on a whim, and it looks vaguely like home. Like you’ve stepped back into a body that wants you. You are so full, so in love, so drunk on being who you want to be. Who cares what people say? Who cares what people think? If you make your own body and nothing else, no one is taking that from you.
It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Not anymore.
When choice is taken from you, you make your own.
When you fall asleep, you dream of a sunlight smile and the trails of stardust in your future. Dream of a girl, once upon a time, who talked about reflecting light and refraction and sun's rays so painful you couldn't turn away. Dream of violet hair and glory and yourself- as you are. As you want to be.
Because this is life. This is at the centre of it all: acceptance, freedom, choice. You have been so fixated on these concepts for so long that they've melted into your mouth. Stayed on your lips. You're not letting go.
You don’t wake up for the end of the world.
You wake up for the beginning of the next one.
--
You cut your hair short, you dye it bright, you learn how to live in your own body.
You wash out the hair dye in time for school, but you don’t grow out your hair.
When your parents tell you to, you look them in the eye. You think about the hole in your stomach that is just beginning to heal. You think that you are looking very unnerving right now.
You say no.
(Because you are in control.)
You tell them about broken candy hearts and want and empty voids, about the space between your fingers and the sun. It's a- confession, it's a challenge, it's everything you never thought you would say but it's all spilling out now. You are overflowing. And then you walk out the door because who cares what they think, who cares, maybe you'll find another smile like the sun, maybe you won't, it's your choice.
And it tastes like freedom, you are free, you are so free your stomach hurts with it. You’re free. It’s overflowing, spilling from your gut into your chest and your heart and every inch of your body.
You’re free.
You freed yourself.