“I can’t wait to start filling out applications for university,” is generally not a phrase most teenagers dare to say.

I on the other hand cannot wait to start the next chapter of my life! However, with the start of each chapter come new antagonists, and with them they bring more challenges. As strange as it may sound I enjoy, relish even, in the fact that someone is so absorbed by the failures of their own life that they take it upon themselves to damper the sunshine in mine.



***
As a Russian girl growing up in America there are certain expectations one must adhere to. For starters, you are not to leave the home until you are married and your only career options are law, medicine, and business. Seeing as I am a student journalist who’s planning to make Mizzou her Alma Modern, my family is less than pleased. Over the years I have developed a love (ironic) relationship with anger and frustration.

Every time a crude comment is thrown my way it makes the anger grow larger. I’ll admit, this is far from the typical love story “of boy meets girl,” but it is one with just as much passion. For you see after time went on I began to crave the feeling their sharp words would give me. Every slice of my ego, my accomplishments was one more reason to prove them wrong.

I tried to please them. I say I’ll compromise. I’ll take a second major; I’ll stay closer to home, but I can’t win.

“Look who’s finally deciding to help out!”

“You wasted so much time this summer! Why do you still not have a job?”

I didn’t have a job because I was interning at a newspaper, but who cares! Right? So I fall deeper in love with anger, but now there is someone new thrown into the mix. Suddenly I’m in a love triangle with anger and intelligence. When their words slice me all I want to do is scream, but then intelligence shows its head. Instead I now just listen, laugh, then shake it off.

And yet I am still accused of being selfish; accused by the very same person who they all want me so desperately to be.

My cousin; my always perfect-never-can-do-no-wrong, nursing school, cousin. To them she is exactly what a well respected Russian girl should be. She cooks, cleans, finished nursing school early, and is saving for a small wedding, for a proposal that has yet to come. To her I am nothing more than a child who needs to learn her place. According to her, my job is to forever stay with my mother, married or not.

Unfortunately, Anna’s method of guilting me into submission only further enforces my belief that she wishes she could have the courage I have to break away from constricting social norms. Perhaps my thinking is conceded, that is what happens when anger and intelligence form a love triangle.



***

For now I grin and pretend I am not fazed. I compile a list of daggers and glass into stories. Relishing in the fact that they wish they could be me. I wonder what they’ll say when I move to New York? Should I lose their numbers now and hope they find me? Or should I try my best to compromise and forever stay in this relationship of anger and intelligence?