still alive, but I have a good reason to die today
(Please don’t tell me if you do not care. My ego is frail.)
There’s that fateful day when you turn 20. You’re not really that cool with the rest of the twenty-somethings because you haven’t yet earned the ‘something’, so anyone “above” you is still entitled to mistake you for a kid, yet many are willing to accept you and test your potential, and any guy over 25 is less paranoid about being accused of hunting jailbait (i.e., you) by his peers.
I suppose I’ve grown even more contemplative than I used to be regarding these annual and slow albeit steady transitions into maturehood. Today I am one year closer to graduation, marriage, menopause, and even death. I’ve just spent the last half-hour coming up with good reasons to be 20. Not that I have any choices anymore, unless time were to somehow augment itself to go backwards by twelve months then do a kamikaze and remain there forever.
Ah well. At least we’re all getting somewhere when we get older, it’s just that sometimes we lose so much more. Being 19 signified that fuzzy line between farting in public and covering my mouth when I burp; between wearing my converse sneakers and dress shoes; between laughing out loud and politely smiling. It meant that I could still be a kid but people would at least sigh and try to understand.
Being 19 lets me recess into the maturity of a 12-year-old; being 20 means I have to start letting go of that, because by the time I’m 21 I can still be immature, but the consequences would be more drastic. There are loads of immature old people out there, but things like barely getting into a pub had this innocent thrill to it. Now it’s just old news.
Perhaps I should stop living life in phases. First it was turning double digits: 12, 16, the painfully slow years to 18, and now it’s the slow trek to 21 before there truly is no more next phase to live for, apart from my money-providing, hot-car-flossing apathetic Irish husband or whoever I get chained up with. After a while, birthdays will stop mattering because I have to crank out some dinner for my kids. Could youth be a disease from which we all recover from? If that is indeed the case, then hold back my medicines, I don’t think I’ll need them just yet.
The narrow shafts of light coming in through my venetian blinds drilled into my head that my existence is in question today. Play me my funeral song, pull the blanket over my head, and bury me next to my lost youth.
On a brighter note, I’m one step closer to pulling off my dentures, wig, glass eye, and prosthetic limb, and really freaking the day lights out of the bloody kiddies.
