I AM THIRTEEN

I'm thirteen. I've been at my friend A's house after school; in my memory, this is something I do most days. A's family is cultured and worldly, unlike my own. My mother, not a good cook, serves fried salmon croquettes and tuna noodle casserole for dinner; I eat my first artichoke at A's dinner table and it is served by a maid. I am just awakening to the wider world and my thirst for it and instinctively I know that dining table is the wider world. I don't realize it but I am at the beginning of many intense rejections of what I have grown up with, of exploring all the roads that lead away from what will be called "my family of origin."
     A's parents are unhappy in their marriage. My knowing it is a link between A and me, a secret she knows I won't betray. A's mother takes to her bed for days at a time, sick with something vague and passing. A and I don't need to mention it, only exchange the briefest of looks when we silently pass her mother's closed bedroom door. There is a shadow on that door and intuitively I know it's a shadow from an adult world I can barely glimpse. Years will have to pass before I wonder if A's mother was an alcoholic, a "periodic" who binged on booze and pills to knock herself out. But now, when we are thirteen, I'm still on the cusp - made nervous by the shadows but also running toward them. 
     On this day, I'm leaving the house with a friend of A's mother. It's April and there'a very gentle drizzle. I don't know it but this weather - grey, slight drizzle, temperature around 60 - will become my favorite. We stop halfway down the long drive to the street, beside a huge rhododendron bush. Water is slowly dripping from the leaves that are just emerging from its winter branches. I sigh and shyly say to this woman I don't know, "I think it's weird, but sometimes Spring makes me sad." I feel self-conscious but she doesn't laugh. Instead, she nods knowingly "Ah, yes," she says, "verdant melancholia." The words sink in and I'm repeating them to myself even as we say goodbye and I get on my bike for the ride home. Verdant melancholia? I've been studying Spanish and I know verde is green - so yes, spring melancholy.  I'm stunned. This woman I will remember nothing else about has just given a name to a feeling I've put into words for the first time, a feeling I didn't even know was there until the moment the words came out. I don't know if she's made up the phrase or if it's something other people know, but either way she understood just what I meant.  Verdant melancholia...
     Until now, my mind and feelings, the me of me, has been something amorphous, undifferentiated, simply the sum of the present I move through. I have not thought about it. But now I have pulled a feeling out of the interior stew and a name has been put to it and, in a heartbeat, my world exponentially expands. I suddenly know there are a thousand other feelings inside me, a million other thoughts, experience upon experience. I feel skyrocketed far above me. I can look down. I can see myself and I can reflect upon it all. For the first time, I understand: there is what I think and feel, and then there is what I think about what I think and feel.      
     Time begins, my time, my own inner history with all its illusions and revelations and endless revisions. I know I have a self; I am a self. Everything is changed.