Thursday, June 13, 2013

Tik, Tok, Tik Tok, My Youth Is Knocking



Being young, it seems like I’m always waiting for something: a term to finish, a graduation, a wedding, all these things that seem so far off. It’s really difficult to wait on the daily—to see how final grades will show up, how a relationship is going to pan out, health test results and treatments for yourself or your dearly loved. It feels like I’m in a holding pin, waiting to taste what’s being cooked up and wanting to be a mouse and scurry up the sleeve to see what’s up there. I’m trying to wait with a purpose, not sitting and doing nothing constructive with my time. But, it’s frustrating when I take step after step forward into moving on in my life and I keep looking behind me, wondering how many steps I have to take before results, answers, and what I’ve been waiting for is triggered and given to me.  

Youth passes too quickly. It’s a thought that’s been hounding me lately, like it’s constantly in my brain and coloring my perception, especially when it comes to waiting. I don’t want to rush these years, months, days, minutes, or seconds away, I don’t. I was walking out of Chipotle today, a place I spent a great deal of time my sophomore year, and it only seemed like yesterday to my mind and when I closed my mind…instead of the 3-4 years ago that is the reality everyone else lives by. Now, I find myself finished with my first year out of high school, but those 2009-2010 days seem so close, proving that time moves quickly. Lately, I’ve been afraid of one day waking up in my suburban house with my husband and teenage children, wanting and missing my youth as much as I currently miss my sophomore year. I wish I could flash forward, make a list of all the things I wish I would have done, and come back and do them today. I don’t want to waste one second. But, when there are images of friends taking amazing trips and having their “new adult” romances, I can’t help but feel like I’m doing it incorrectly and that I’m wasting my seconds of being sparkly and “new.”   

But, it’s hard to be happy when you’re waiting to hear from doctors on what imaging means, there’s no stability for your loving heart, and it seems too long since you’ve been happy. I’m really striving to capture every second and moment of my youth, having lived it so fully and worn it out that there’s no way to miss it one day—because being unable to return to that place is the worst type of missing there is. So I’m waiting and trying to wrap myself in the number 19. I won’t let the sands of my youth slip through wasted. It’s just learning, trying, hoping, seeking, and needing a balance between understanding my feelings are valid and not letting their validation rob me of where I am today.

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