It is fitting that this is my 100th blog post as well as my last post before I join the ranks of individuals everywhere who have lived 2+ decades upon this sweet earth. That change happens in t minus 30 minutes as I write these words.
On my couch this evening I sit in quiet being and do not think about it and then I am twenty. The 15th is a day that I am always writing down on applications and receipts and verification processes so that it has come to associate itself with a specific familiarity.
A specific familiar feeling like that of winter jacket in the summer - you see it hanging in your closet and you remember that a time will come when you will take it up again but now you are bare shouldered and blue-sky eyed.
Does that make sense?
Because I take up this day, and gladly, but there is a sentiment of despair that accompanies it. Is despair too harsh a word? I am sorry. I welcome time. (Or at least, I believe in welcoming time) But while my contemporaries,
counterparts,
and I suck greedily from the cup of years, our ploys and decisive lives are shown for what they really are.
Narratives that will never be stopped of our own accord. Because while the power feels tangible, as Mother Society and Father Government divide and subdivide our rations of political freedoms and civil liberties, (I'm sixteen so I drive; I'm eighteen so I smoke and vote; I'm twenty-one so I'll drink to that) We can't ever choose when to be these things and when to receive. In my nineteenth year I was given experiences based upon my age and everything I had known prior to that. So I ended my first year of college, packing up my things and driving home alone except for a sense of identity and exhaustion. The return of summer showed me forty hour work weeks and how to touch the earth every day. Weddings and sisters. In my nineteenth year I drove to Chicago and became acquainted with my own road. I peed in Lake Michigan and on a rocky beach before the Grand Tetons and inside a Crater of the Moon.
Yes I count those things as achievements.
In my nineteenth year I learned that I will always be arriving and emerging and I don't always have to love the feel of that. But just to love, I think, is what is to be had. Though I've felt my heart turn quiet in a way that makes me scared, I know to seek a murmuring spirit that I suspect might reside inside everyone.
No I do not suspect it; I imagine.
And to imagine is where I've found a sense of peculiar identity. I've found it in my feeling soul, in the roots of the people from whom I come, and a devil's advocate who I know has taken up forever residency within me. If he left now I would feel different. I've found a mole on my cheek, messy hair, and small hands, (Though I don't prescribe to physiognomy).
Despair can only lift once you have named it. With that in mind I feel different as I close this thing and go to sleep. Adam himself must have held the deepest emotions before he started through the line of animals, gently calling: "lion, monkey, hare." But on this couch I sit, and I've let time take its toll from me once again, though I did not choose this bridge. Though something about it all has equalized in the moments between start and finish. So in peace and quiet being once again I listen to the rain etching declivities down my apartment's cheap window panes.
And God willing, here's to the twentieth year.
4 comments:
what i appreciate most about this is that you talked about how you grew and what you learned, but you didn't do it in a list form. i like lists. but you are more poetic, and it is fitting you write about your life this way.
blue-sky eyed is a quality adjective. i'm sure the twenties will be glad to have you in their ranks.
Cheers. Party time?
Post a Comment