In little more than a month, I am going to be in the backseat of my parents’ car, or alone with the lights off in my room, or standing wordlessly in the middle of the bathroom, and I am going to quietly turn eighteen.
The day before, there will have been gifts and cake and music; in the morning, there will be more gifts, more cake, more music. But in that moment, in that single tremor of the second hand of the clock, there will be stillness. Silence. Nothing will have changed; everything will have changed.
I’m not done with being seventeen yet, but I also think I’m ready to be more.
There will be fear, and there will be excitement, and there will be disappointment in not having lived my childhood better. There will, too, be no engulfing feeling, because the reality of the situation would not have begun to set in. A tick, seventeen. Another, eighteen. Not much of a difference, but a world of it all the same. Five-year-old me, eight-year-old me, twelve-year-old me all looking expectantly at my eyes. Me, seventeen, eighteen, both and neither, looking expectantly at the clock.
And then the calls would come in, and my doors would open, and I’d blow a candle and have cake on my tongue and on my cheeks, and there would be my mother pressing me to her side and my father kissing the top of my head. Because my childhood was never mine to lose. Because none of the million things sitting in clumps in my brain were real yet. Because I was seventeen, eighteen, both and neither.
But a few days later. In the shower, or on the couch, or on the way to class, it would hit me. Or no, ‘hit’ is not the word for it, because it would be as gentle as it would be debilitating. It would wash over me, then, pool around my feet and then rise with startling speed, heaving me under with relentless tenderness. And I won’t be a child anymore, and everything will be foreign and different and nothing would ever be the same again. There is no five, eight, twelve-year-old me. There is only this one. I would pause, just for a moment. I would close my eyes. I would open them. And then I would continue. The knowledge of change is enough to drag me off my feet, but not enough to have the world grate to a halt.
And I would sit, and I would be quiet. I would breathe. Because there would have been no change, no difference. Because time passes every second anyway. Because I would look at my hands and see that growing up hurts less than it bleeds.