About a tomboy

Being a tomboy at six or seven years of age is great. You get to do exciting things, like running around in shorts and t-shirts, barefoot, scabbed knees, daring each other to do more and more outrageous stunts. You get to play at being adventurers, climb trees, mess around with mud, sticks, and worms, and the world is your oyster. Of course most of your playmates are boys, but hey, at about seven years old, they have more fun than girls.

Then at about 12 or 13, it's a totally different story. Boys are going to stay boys their whole lives, but little girls grow into young ladies, and then the boys start noticing. They're soon much happier looking at the pretty little blonde things in dresses with perfect pigtails, and if you didn't jump on the frills-and-lace bandwagon as soon as you hit this definitive moment in your life, you're going to spend the rest of it chasing the damn thing down.

Then you're stuck here, at nineteen, with a wardrobe of jeans, one pair of all-weather-all-occasion trainers, and three hoodies. A little makeup here, a skirt there, and the guys you grew up with turn around and tease you, reminding you about that "I'll never ever wear a dress" speech you made after your tenth birthday party when your mother forced you into one... so, embarrassed, you put away the pretty things you long to put on, to pull off, and go back to the shorts and sweats - it's not like you know how to put make up on anyway, hell, it was hard enough learning to wear a bra.

But then you see that elegant lady across the street in her perfectly-groomed entirety, knowing that every dead skin cell has been buffed away, that every nail's been polished; and start to wonder if your earring's will ever match your shoes, whether you'll ever remember to brush your hair when you get out of bed, and whether you'll ever be able to catch up to that wagon.