My Last Innocent Year

by Daisy Alpert Florin

I wasn’t a debater by nature and somewhere along the way had come to believe that what I felt, if it couldn’t be articulated or defended, was invalid.

In the end, I don’t know what made people angrier, the vandalism or the word womyn.

I would soon come to understand that adulthood was exactly this: the constant upending of everything you believed when you were young.

I realized that no matter what he had done to me, I would always be the one unpacking that night, wondering what I might have said or done differently.

There is no such thing as a clean slate. We take our decisions with us, no matter how much we wish we could leave them behind.

I felt giddy but strangely empty, unmoved by the ceremony that had marked our passage from student to graduate. Nothing had changed really, it was just time, which had run out on us at last, the escalator flattened to a line of metal teeth and there was nothing left to do now but step off.