I fell out, and I was born. That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. But birth did not mark my beginning: I began the day a classmate deemed me worthy to behold the knowledge of the ‘Superman S’. I began gap-toothed. I began in a farmer’s market sample bucket, and I hope to meet my end in the rind-disposal bin. I began inside a box of freezer-burnt lime popsicles. I began in every new country, stepping off a plane to a swell of balmy heat or a rush of biting cold. I began difficult, stubborn, rigid—all the things you call a girl cursed with an inflated sense of self. I began in the shelter of a tree’s outstretched branches, in the domed pinpricks of blood as pine needles split the tips of my ruddy fingers. I began the day I learned you don’t grow babies in the garden. I began the day they let me ring the lunch bell, and the girls kept coming and coming. I began the day my blood smeared Yogurtland’s pebble-studded floor. I began as the tangle of roots that sprouted from a kernel into a corn stalk, enclosed in a Ziploc bag. I began the day I failed to dodge the swinging fists of femininity. I’ve begun, and begun to begin again, and I’ll keep beginning until old age hammers curves into my spine, or carves a map of my beginnings into the smooth parchment of my body. As I sip my tea or shake my cane at pesky grandchildren, I’ll begin a new kind of beginning: the beginning of the end.

Sasha Greenfield is a high school sophomore from Los Angeles, California. A columnist at the Larchmont Buzz, Sasha’s writing has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers with Gold and Silver Keys, as well as the Archer School For Girls’ Literature &… conference. Fascinated by the topics of adolescence and change, Sasha’s work explores the experience of growing up through prose and poetry.