Still Here

I hate this concept of coming of age. 

And of being human. 

Why couldn’t I just be an animal? Or an energy? 

But then at the same time, I love being human. 

Maybe it’s just the feeling I hate. 

Christmas is around the corner and the love I once lived in, fell apart a few blocks back. 

Why must a challenging world make such simple things so difficult? 

As I walk on the same streets that I once did at sixteen, fresh waves of nostalgia wash over me. And it happens every single fucking time. 

My dad always tells me to appreciate time. 

But this coming-of-age thing makes it so hard to befriend it. 

It feels nice when time goes by fast, I dread it when it’s slow and I despise it when it stops. 

This year I began to notice things. 

I started to notice that the spring blooms that were once in May turn into rustic and amber leaves during the fall. Then those leaves somehow disappear as I walk out my door. And suddenly  I enter the whirling of winter as I get pumped with the perfect amount of windchill. 

Discomfort with change, as much as I tried to acclimate myself into it, never really went away the more I aged. And I’m still aging. 

I feel like this because I learned that you can never go back to what’s already happened. It can only be returned in an imperfect form. And why do I still convince myself that this is a bad thing? 

I’ve learned a lot about myself this year too. 

Funny how I’ve been living with her for 20 twenty years and we’re just now meeting. 

I observe everything in silence, and feel the subtle changes in the way adults begin to speak to me as I grow older. 

 I’m also experiencing how hard it is to actually stay alive. Why does no one talk about this? 

I’m learning that everyone around me lives in different realities. 

We all have different priorities and see life through different lenses. 

It’s an intimidating thought- I at least think, how people can be in a space together yet experience things in an erratically different way. 

Isn’t it weird? How we have to get a little older to realize that people are just people. It should be obvious but it’s not. 

You see that’s the peculiar thing about being human. 

Nobody just leaves in one go. At least for me.

I keep pieces of me, fragments of hope, fragments of who I once was with other people. And I carry these fragments everywhere, and sometimes, that is enough.

I’m constantly fighting the urge to wrap the people I love in one of those abrupt, emotional thankyou hugs because I don’t want to come off as too dramatic. 

But maybe that’s the only part about me that makes me… me 

My mistake this year and the last, was that I associated people with my solitude. 

And I did it so much that when they’d leave or when things would fade, or when life would hit, I was destroyed. 

Every. Single. Time. 

But now, I take refuge in the most perfect solitude. 

My solitude. 

And at the same time, I love this. 

I love it here. This freedom. This newfound agency. 

And the relearning that being selfish doesn’t always necessarily have to tie into being a narcissist. 

I refuse to write myself into a story that isn’t meant to be about me. 

I am not that girl. 

I never want to be that girl. 

Becoming a writer, let alone an “author” is like being lost and just having to hope to God you stumble to your destination. 

Changing the timeline was not a job that I had signed up for, but rather one that was assigned. 

I just know I’m only supposed to experience a story that’s about me. 

And I’m learning that this is what my life is meant to be about. 

xo

- Nat