Welcome to Gaia! ::

Our whole lives are about growing. Growing taller, growing wiser and growing more mature. Along with this growth comes a multitude of friendships. Toddlers from nursery school to kids from the playground to our very best friends at the high school lunch table. We turn eighteen knowing more people than days we’ve been alive. Part of growing up is discovering who you are. By eighteen, knowing what you like and dislike is a rite of passage. You have a pretty clear idea of how you like to be treated and how to treat others. Maybe that’s why it took until January of my senior year to realize exactly what was going on. There came a point in the year where I realized that my decisions had made me a stronger person. I had fought tooth and nail in a friendship that had chipped at me for years and now I was surrounded by a new group that had buffed and polished me into a shiny new toy. I was starting university in the fall and I knew I had to move on from high school for the fact that, except for those closest to me, the people I had known from high school were irrelevant at this stage in my life.

Our whole lives are about growing. Growing taller, growing wiser and growing more mature. Growing our hair is even included. But sometimes cutting our hair helps us grow more wise, more mature. We discover that growing our hair could have been what was holding us back, what was keeping us from moving on from the bad in our lives. We truly are hiding behind our hair. That is a mistake I will never make again.

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf–rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you;

All of it, every single word, were things Eudica had read. About growing up, becoming someone new, becoming a different her. She didn't mind the advice that came from all over, the advice that she didn't always know what to do with. But it was there, for her, reaching out a hand if she ever felt like grabbing it. The nightmare sat, contemplating it all, what it meant to grow up.