A Lot Of Wishing I Knew What I Wanted

I’m closer to 30 than I am 20 and that’s something I involuntarily think about before I sleep. I’m clinging to this idea that your 20s should be bad. Right? They should be. Actually, 30 isn’t something I fear. 30 is a beacon of light I’m hoping doesn’t disappoint. 30 is a billboard I made it out alive, scars and all.

I keep rewriting what I want out of life and it’s a lot of “I guess I wouldn’t mind” and “maybe there’s a way to…” — ya know, nothing concrete. No vision boards or active plans that take you from A to Z. Everything is a gentle tiptoe, a whisper in a classroom full of silent kids trying to finish the last test of the year.

I guess, there I go again with “I guess” — I guess I’m trying to ace a class I have no clue how to design. I’m begging the teacher to call on me as if that will POOF make everything else click into place. I’m mourning the precocious elementary school kid with a firm hand in the air thinking she’s the shit. Who knew she was the shit. Who already had answers to whatever you threw at her.

Don’t call it a quarter-life crisis. Call it a broken heart. Not from all the failed romance. Not from men who could have been something and never texted back. Call it a broken heart because the heart gets tired when there’s no direction for it to beat.

I told my mom I don’t want to write depressing shit anymore. So I stopped writing.

I’m closer to 30 than I am 20 and have never been more lost. I cried to my boyfriend on the phone for almost an hour because I missed my home. Sometimes I don’t know what home is anymore. Sometimes I think adulthood is forgetting everything that made me whole.

Tell me, is that part of the plan?

Tell me, is this growing up?