I think I have become the girl I never wanted to be. There is dog hair on everything I own, including my toothbrush, and I actually brush my teeth every night before I go to bed...for way more than two minutes. I floss pretty regularly. I am a closet smoker; I put my cigarette out before I go through my bank's drive through, because I don't want the tellers to know I smoke. When I know my friend Heather is coming over, I hide my cigarettes in the cabinet and chew gum. I am productive on the weekends. I wake up every morning...even when I have an awful hangover. I eat breakfast almost every day...my boyfriend says breakfast is his favorite time to spend with me, not being sweaty and hot in the sack. In fact, he doesn't even know I'm hot in the sack, because we've been dating for two months and we have never had sex. I rarely eat a bag of chips for dinner. Regular meals have made me kind of fat, so I don't wear short shorts or shirts that show my stomach. My back hurts a lot. I always feel the inside of my mouth with my tongue, and my neck with the pads of my fingers. I convince myself that every lump I find is some kind of cancer, and don't just dismiss it as some weird lump, like I did when I was younger. I don't eat fast food. I make my bed. I almost always wear a bra. I don't smoke pot anymore. It doesn't relax me; it winds me up and I end up organizing my closet or alphabetizing my cds until four a.m.. I get upset when I don't take a shit at my regular time of day, and then I am happy to drink prune juice and stay home on a Friday night crapping my brains out and reading. There are no elective courses left for me to take at community college; I have taken every lit course they offer except for one. There are no hot guys for me to moon over in classes anymore, there haven't been for years now. I would feel like a pederast. I have no friends, because I don't like people or their problems; my mom, my dog, and my sisters are my best friends. I only have one birthday left to look forward to, the next one, because my car insurance will decrease. To me, all of these are sure signs of one thing only...that I am getting older. The number one sign that I am aging, is that I can't find time. I can't make time. I have no time. I don't even have time to be writing this; I feel like I should be doing laundry or something...paying bills. Ick. That first sentence wasn't true. It's not that I don't like who I've become, it's that I was so sure like everyone else in the world that I'd be young forever. Isn't it funny that we spend the first twenty or so years of our lives in a hurry to grow up, and whatever else we are blessedwith trying to stay young? Maybe I am being dramatic. In fact, I am most definitely a complete drama queen, always have been. At least that much hasn't changed.
I promised myself on a sunny spring afternoon in Maine when I was sixteen that I would never be too old to lay in a field eating salad out of a large bowl and imagining shapes in the clouds while wearing a large and perhaps unattractive hat. I would do that tomorrow. I will do that tomorrow, if I can find the time.