"All grown up"

[trinsy]

Today is my eighteenth birthday. I’m not very excited about it, to be honest. I liked being seventeen. Seventeen was an age that suited me: hovering on the edge, old enough to join in with the adults but young enough to avoid the responsibility, almost grown up but not quite there, in transit between child and adulthood.

Eighteen is legally an adult. It doesn’t make me one, but now more is going to be expected of me, and it makes the idea of being grown up even less of a distant dream and more of a frightening reality.

This is it.

Time flows relentlessly forward. I won’t be a child forever. The government considers me an adult now, and that means that someday in the no-longer-distant future real people will too.

And that scares me.

The following is a poem I wrote to my mom about my feelings on moving from my childhood home in southern California to a small town in Texas.  I wrote it in about twenty minutes, and it's not that good, but I still felt like posting it, so here it is:

Dear Mom

I used to think my room was small;
Didn’t realize I had it all;
The ocean and the mountains
Always just minutes away.

The freeway was just down the street,
The malls and restaurants hard to beat,
No entertainment wanting
Just as long as it was day.

True, I never had that life,
Didn’t make such a huge sacrifice.
Surfing? Skiing? Not my things,
And shopping was for other beings.

But still it was the life I knew,
No seasons, just the ocean blue,
And cookie-cutter houses ‘neath
A mountain peak-lined sky.

Why do I bother writing this?
Why are those the things I miss?
Things I complained about for years,
Yet their loss makes me cry.

I don’t think I’ll get used to this,
The vastness and the small town-ness;
The lack of freeways and of malls;
The blazing summers and the falls;

The destruction of my childhood.
Dramatic? Well, you’d I think I would
Be anything but calm and dull:
My world’s spinning out of control.

I lost the only life I knew
And just remember: I’m not you.
I've nothing here to come home to,
No memories, it’s only you,
And that’s just not enough.

So if I seem a little bitter,
It’s only ‘cause I’m scared.
If I sound a little angry,
Well, it’s just because I care.
And if I say I’m homeless,
It’s because to me it’s true.
If I seem less than happy,
It’s because I am not you.