Waking brightness greeted my sleep crusted eyes and I shut them faster than ever. I wished to lay in my white sheets for eternity, for their harboring weight kept me from the unknown world I was about to step into– one year older. Their white fabric felt warmer than the hostile breeze that snuck beneath it– the antagonizing cold air that crept up every inch of me, washing away nineteen. I sealed my eyes shut harder, and the next time I opened them I would accept a new tally mark on my life. The world was dark aside from flashing moments of bliss with each breath– reminders of my last teenage years. Each tired brush of my fingertips along my sleep woven eyes drew a new memory, a new feeling that would now be considered the best moments of nineteen. My head dug further into my bed trying to clasp onto those last remaining minutes before nineteen became a memory in itself.
Twenty sounded exceptionally old. I watched my first kiss again, the first time I had ever fallen in love, when I moved across the country by myself. I watched my smiles, my laughs, cries, and other beautiful emotions slip past me closing that door forever.Twenty. I was twenty. My kitchen was celebratorily empty when I strode into it nude and naked of nineteen, to make my morning coffee. My skin felt cold and older, my smile felt more used, and my life felt shorter. I poured boiling black coffee into a mug, curling my older fingers around its handle and wound up on my couch to look out the window– to admire the passerbyers of all ages. Twenty just seemed so different than my past birthdays, and so out of place.
It would seem ridiculous to skip, to bounce the soles of my shoes exactly three feet from each other, as a twenty year old . To run up to my apartment with three bags of groceries and try to keep them from slipping through a paper bag for pure enjoyment. To dance in the middle of a street because I could and I never felt more alive. It all seems ridiculous, yet it’s only one year. Only an extra 365 days, yet days that name me no longer a kid. What about ordering chocolate milk at dinner or chicken tenders and fries. Or running errands in my slept in plaid pajamas while owning it and conquering the world. I’m supposed to be put together at twenty, though hidden from me is the instruction manual. I want to be a ridiculous mess and wild and free and nineteen.
Lost in thought, I watched the people pass by my window and took a sip of piping coffee to drown my insides with warmth and fight the naked bitterness that branded a new tally mark. And then the warmth faded and that cold air washed over me again. I stood bare before my window now, resting my back against the wall, craving its support when I closed my eyes again to rewind time. Support to hold me when I fell back into those moments of being a reckless teenager. I watched the years pass by beneath the blackness of my yearning eyes as nineteen was then glossed over. And then eighteen. And every year before that. I didn’t want to grow up, nor stop skipping and running or dancing around. I wanted to be a twenty some kid forever, and then a thirty some woman skipping down the aisle at her wedding. And after that maybe a grandmother dancing her way to the grave. And then I’d run through the warm blanket of white heavenly clouds to laugh above our world because age is just a number, and society sways us otherwise.
Photo by: Emma Mobley