You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession

by Piper Weiss

All that keeps you from disappearing is another person who sees you. What happens when they look away?

There are two kinds of perpetrators: those strangers on the street and those you already know. All of them are men. Strangers lurk in public spaces or follow you down side streets, while those you know could be anywhere.

Play to Win. If my mother could needlepoint this motto on a pillow, my father would rest his head against it.

I’ve done this before, walked past someone I knew, pretending to be engaged in a focal point to the right or left of his or her face, bracing myself for the moment the person says my name, deflated when he or she doesn’t. It’s both a paralysis of indecision and a deep insecurity that my face is not recognizable enough to be differentiated from other humans.

I’m an airtight jar of carbonated steam. Throw me out the window and watch me burst—all crystal spit and heat.

The bond between two girls surrounded by boys is so fragile, always threatened by embarrassment, especially if that embarrassment isn’t shared.

I took wishes seriously, using birthday candles, loosened eyelashes, and fountain pennies to wish for the same thing—that nobody I love dies. When they hadn’t, I believed it was because of me.

So I began the grieving process in advance, to prepare for what the pain might consist of, the sickness it carried with it. It felt like melting—all the fluids in my body were draining out of me—and it sounded like Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville, like Peter Cetera and Cher, like Phil Collins and REO Speedwagon, like Lite FM.

When a new generation of young women became the target audience, and the Internet provided more accurate measurements of interest, political action, feminism and intersectionality, body image, and cultural appropriation were shoehorned into the same categories. There were countless debates about whether a story about body shaming belongs in the section marked fashion, or whether campus assault could be filed under health. The labels were useless, outdated, but still slow to be replaced. As an editor, I could have fought or merely suggested a change. But there were more pressing priorities, and I still believed that such categories appealed to women, even if they didn’t appeal to me. Whoever invented them knew what it meant to be a woman more than I did. I believed this in the same way that I believed that women cared about gift guides, fashion week, and viral proposal videos; in the same way I made a nasal prolonged sound when someone showed me their baby’s picture or their engagement ring or a story about a man who did something nice. I was covering up the fact that I didn’t feel anything. I was pretending to be a woman, in the way women are perceived, in the hopes that it would quiet the girl inside me who resisted.

We hug outside the restaurant. “It was good to see you,” she says, now that we’ve already seen each other and we’re about to not see each other, because the past is the past and there’s no going back to change it.

“It’s that everyone leaves me,” he says, gripping the wheel with two hands. “You all grow up and you go away and you leave me all alone.”

My mom wants to know how I feel. “Fine,” I say. I feel nothing I can share. All the feelings are drowned out anyway by the clamoring adults—those who want to know the secrets and those who want to keep them. The ones who want to sell us our fears, and the ones who want to believe such fears don’t exist. All of them making up the rules. None of them listening to us. I feel like I want to scream, but I’m not supposed to. If I must, I can whisper to a therapist, a keeper of secrets who will deposit my feelings in a vault with the others, because the side I’m on is the side that’s been chosen for me.

This is the line of women that has led to me. Each one with her own struggles and resentment, which she tried to correct with the next generation. Each time creating new struggles and resentment.