My mother says every birthday is important.

"We're celebrating you being born, mi hija."

My sister says there are only major milestones that matter. 10, 13, 16, 18, 21, 25, and then you're dead inside.

What neither of them told me was how I would feel, how I wouldn't feel, and all the shades in between. How, when I woke up today for my sixteenth birthday, I would still feel two—small and afraid of anything beyond the view from behind my mother's legs.

If I could choose any age, it would be six—bold and budding. Summers in frilly one-pieces with mama playing with you in the water as you splash her in guerrilla warfare. Nap time beside your friends in class and whispering things that seem so much more important than following the "no talking" rule. Looking up to your bigger sister like the super hero she is.

But no, I do not feel six and I'm stuck with sixteen.

When you're 16, you only live once but you're forever young too. You have to live fast, but all you do is chill out. You get high when you're feeling low and you get downers when you feel too high. You're friends with your enemies and enemies with your friends but when it comes time to talk about how you feel, all you can muster is "I'm fine".

I'm sick of it already and I haven't even gotten out of bed.

I want to be 10—double digit pioneer and grade four queen. Batting my eyelashes and throwing dirt at boys that I insist are nauseating in every sense. Wearing little heels on my school shoes that go click-clack as I race through the newly waxed hallways. Growing lumps under my shirt and asking my mom about the changing landscape of my body, fingertips like legs on sharp, u-turn curves and flaring hips because I went through puberty a year earlier than all the other girls in my class.

I want to laugh with the jubilation of a four year old. I want to cry with the nonsensical reasoning of a one year old. I want to play like I'm seven, innocence and interwoven friends. We got high on swings and dirt on our pants and scrapes on our knees and cuts on our hands.

I don't want to work like I'm sixteen, buried under my inexperience and insensitivity and insecurities. I don't want to breathe like I'm sixteen, eternally choked up from the fatty tissue of words stored in my cheeks, wheezing from the smog of all I can't see yet, sinking through my eyelids and leaving me in eternal darkness. I especially do not want to love like I'm sixteen, wholly and wholeheartedly in love with a boy who has pricked me more than my vain attempts to stitch and sew.

And as I close my eyes and wait for my mother and sister to burst through my door, candles in cake ablaze, I know what I will wish for.

"Anything but sixteen."