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I think that every year around my birthday, I say something to the effect of, every year around my birthday, I fall headlong into a roiling pit of existential angst. Which is true, and seems to get truer with every passing year. You know how I say I miss being excited? I really miss being excited right now. My eighteenth birthday's in six days and I haven't got plans, I haven't got the nice bats-in-the-stomach shutting-the-door-so-I-can-wring-my-hands-in-excitement feeling that I always used to have. Though really it's the lack of plans that bothers me most, because as I have said many, many times, I am deeply ritualistic by nature. I like things to be Just So, and I like to arrange them, and surround significant days with significant rituals large and small. Last year Dad and I went to the city, and the art museum, and it was glorious, and I can't think of anything other than that, or anything more significant than that, and you know maybe I just want to get lost in some city somewhere and ride the subway without any destination in mind and take photographs of graffiti and people waiting for buses and lamp-posts and buildings with vines growing all over them and trees growing out of the pavement. I want to do something quiet that I won't have to recover from afterwards, something that has the flavour of watching the night sky at Grey Fox last year, or on the picnic table of the cabin in October, or walking through the art museum last birthday, or the walk I took by accident when there was almost rain and the sun was setting, or running through Pittsburgh at night with Dad trying to find a suitable place to eat before going to a concert sort of in a library, or watching Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet perform songs so strange and beautiful that my soul rose straight out of my body and fluttered birdlike over the amphitheatre.
(Maybe I should just say, Mum, Dad, can we just go driving around in the city for my birthday? And then we could come home and rent Once or something, and I could lie out on the roof and listen to something beautiful while the sun sets. Except, gas prices, reality, argh.)
And you can't create those incandescent moments; they come unbidden. I try to arrange them and they don't come; they're not like pigeons, you can't leave them crumbs and hope they'll come in flocks to collect them.
Furthermore it bothers me that I'm about to be eighteen, that I'm on the threshold of legal adulthood, and I haven't got much of anything to show for it. I don't like meeting people I haven't seen in a long, long time, because there is always the question, so, what have you been doing? And I have to fumble for things. What have I done in the past several years, besides little things? Sometimes the little things were lovely ones, but they were still little things, and I think, I'm the least grown-up person I know, and possibly the dullest. Other people go out and have adventures, or find adventures; I tell stories and make adventures out of the things that weren't. I haven't got a job and I haven't got any hobbies that get me out of the house, and even the hobbies I do have -- writing, photography, music -- I haven't exactly done much with. I think about going busking sometime, and then I think I'm too shy, and this city is too small anyway. I write a few words or a few sentences in the same story every two days or so. Sometimes I remember to take pictures of things. I don't work hard at it. I'm awkward in my own skin. I don't know whether I'm meant to grow into it, or take it in to fit.
And none of the people I am or pretend to be are the person I want to be, and they don't match up very well. I feel like a patchwork quilt sewn over another patchwork quilt with thick, black, awkward stitches.
Of course because I am too ritualistic I think that eighteen should be some sort of gateway, that I'll start solving my own puzzles and stop standing so crookedly and make something out of myself but things never turn out the way the patterns work. (Sometimes I wonder if there's an alternate universe in which I actually love mathematics, because all of the patterns and progressions and lists and arrangements don't mesh with me, haphazard and clumsy and messy and thoroughly literary, seeing and tasting in colours and emotion and intuition and photographs.)
Maybe I'll get a job, and finish a story, and find a college, and a major, and a purpose, and learn how to be excited again, how to love people, how to be optimistic. I don't know. I don't know.
(Maybe I should just say, Mum, Dad, can we just go driving around in the city for my birthday? And then we could come home and rent Once or something, and I could lie out on the roof and listen to something beautiful while the sun sets. Except, gas prices, reality, argh.)
And you can't create those incandescent moments; they come unbidden. I try to arrange them and they don't come; they're not like pigeons, you can't leave them crumbs and hope they'll come in flocks to collect them.
Furthermore it bothers me that I'm about to be eighteen, that I'm on the threshold of legal adulthood, and I haven't got much of anything to show for it. I don't like meeting people I haven't seen in a long, long time, because there is always the question, so, what have you been doing? And I have to fumble for things. What have I done in the past several years, besides little things? Sometimes the little things were lovely ones, but they were still little things, and I think, I'm the least grown-up person I know, and possibly the dullest. Other people go out and have adventures, or find adventures; I tell stories and make adventures out of the things that weren't. I haven't got a job and I haven't got any hobbies that get me out of the house, and even the hobbies I do have -- writing, photography, music -- I haven't exactly done much with. I think about going busking sometime, and then I think I'm too shy, and this city is too small anyway. I write a few words or a few sentences in the same story every two days or so. Sometimes I remember to take pictures of things. I don't work hard at it. I'm awkward in my own skin. I don't know whether I'm meant to grow into it, or take it in to fit.
And none of the people I am or pretend to be are the person I want to be, and they don't match up very well. I feel like a patchwork quilt sewn over another patchwork quilt with thick, black, awkward stitches.
Of course because I am too ritualistic I think that eighteen should be some sort of gateway, that I'll start solving my own puzzles and stop standing so crookedly and make something out of myself but things never turn out the way the patterns work. (Sometimes I wonder if there's an alternate universe in which I actually love mathematics, because all of the patterns and progressions and lists and arrangements don't mesh with me, haphazard and clumsy and messy and thoroughly literary, seeing and tasting in colours and emotion and intuition and photographs.)
Maybe I'll get a job, and finish a story, and find a college, and a major, and a purpose, and learn how to be excited again, how to love people, how to be optimistic. I don't know. I don't know.
