Entry 03

What they don’t tell you about growing up, is that it is not subtle, or slow, or in any way easy. At all. 

They tell you it goes by fast, yes, but yesterday I was driving to Boston by myself and the day before I was grabbing my mom’s leg, begging her to order food for me. 

The day before, I was rear-ended on a highway in Connecticut, alone. The day before, I was riding on my dad’s shoulders at a folk festival. 

They don’t tell you about the impact, or the fall, or the feeling that you actually might be completely and utterly alone, in a state, where you quite possibly do not know a single person. 

Yeah, that is the funny thing about getting older. Time goes by slower in the short term, but somehow manages to fly by underneath your nose before you remember what day it is, and then you are walking into school on the first day of your senior year. 

And there are so many things you simply don’t know, while somehow, knowing everything all at once. It makes you wonder when you draw the line, when you have finally become an adult, because I simply don’t believe that at the magical age of 18, you are free of childish burden. 

And I don’t necessarily know when I would say I made that change. Maybe when I got on the highway, 84, heading northbound towards Massachusetts. Maybe when I crossed the border to New York and realized, wow, I have about 4 more hours to go before I can even lay in a stranger’s bed, in an Airbnb I scheduled the night before. 

But if I had to guess, I would say it was the impact. The smashing of the bumpers, the license plate indent, the sound of my back seats slapping against the one I was sitting in, the feeling of, oh my god, I have to get off this road, out of this car, and wow, my neck hurts. 

You learn to miss naivety. You learn to miss the longing of growing older, the longing of becoming the best I can be, and the disappointment of every event that has led up to this point in my life.

And then I remember, maybe it was the good times. Maybe I had reached the threshold of adulthood when I found the boy that fulfilled every hole in my heart, who would do anything for me, who would hold up the sun and moon and throw them away if I had a headache. 

Or, maybe it was the day I received the keys to my baby, my Audi A6, Elton. Maybe it was the day I learned how not to pull out of my garage, losing a little bit of my bumper and confidence on the same day. 

Or maybe it was the time my mom began to trust me to walk alone. Walk home from the bus stop at my local gas station, walk to the beach by myself on vacation, travel by aircraft at 14, alone. 

That is the deciding factor to me, when you start to feel so alone and suddenly, everything is becoming muddled, everything is becoming hard, and everything feels like a problem that a phone call with your dad could solve. 

I remember a dream my mom had, where she was able to talk to my dad for just a few minutes through some inter-life-death phone call system. I remember wishing so wholeheartedly, with every fiber of my being, that I could see him when I would close my eyes. I love being close to the ocean. I could see his eyes in the sky on a rough and windy night at the beach, and I felt like I could talk to him like he was there with me. 

And maybe that is when I grew up. The night I stayed in the hospital, the night I picked out funeral clothes and cried because everything looked so bad and I looked so bad and no one would be able to face the judge’s daughter while she wore a silly checkered dress because no one can prepare you for that moment. I felt selfish, I felt stupid, I felt guily, and I didn’t know half of what I was feeling. I didn’t know anything. Maybe it was the point in my life, where everything hurt so unbelievably bad. 

It might have been the time I drove to the cemetery in my grandma’s old Honda. I stepped out of the car, and the haunting realization hit. You cannot visit a cemetery stone when there is 5 feet of snow on the ground. It took months to force myself to visit, to work up the nerve to finally make that turn, and it all suddenly felt ruined. 

I got out of the car and screamed over yards of snow to the grave, hoping he, or anyone, for that matter, could hear. I stepped as close to the edge as I could, and tripped, smashing my face into inches of ice and snow. 

No one can prepare you for the moment that you lay face down on the road of a forgotten cemetery, hands bleeding from slices of ice, silently sobbing into the ground below you. 

No one can prepare you for the rise up, for the shaking of the hands, for the guilt you feel leaving. They can’t prepare you for your Honda Civic getting stuck in the ice while trying to turn out of the cemetery, stuck and frantic while trying to avoid being side swiped on a busy road. For the inherent guilt that maybe this is all happening for a reason and I deserve to feel guilty for taking so long to visit the grave. 

They don’t prepare you for the spring visits, seeing the flowers grow in the garden he fostered, the empty seedings years later. They don’t prepare you for lying on the grass in your work clothes, sobbing to the sky, begging for anyone to hear and just make it better. 

They don’t prepare you for anything. not guilt, not surviving, and certainly not the pain of breathing when you know you’re thriving off of the air that your loved ones no longer breathe. 

So, I don’t necessarily know when I decided, or was forced, to grow up. I could go out on a limb and say I know nothing, and maybe I never will know anything.