On 22

My confusion is thick. It soon makes way to irritation, frustration, before morphing unsuspectingly but rapidly into all encompassing, hot-headed, full blown fury that turns the grey walls white and the blue sky red. My rage is often founded on comprehensible things. The injustices of modern society and the seemingly ignorant stupidity of those in charge of running it; the way innocence is so often caught up in crossfire with there no one left to pick up the pieces; the hurtful, horrible and hateful things that people do to each other. But I would be lying if I said all my anger was valid, justified and well thought out. The questions that inundate my everyday life are generally of the more mundane, the less pressing, the mostly obvious. Why is Ikea furniture actually impossible to put together? Why do my clothes remain stained even after the use of stain remover? Why does the garlic always burn when I put it in the frying pan? Why do gas, water and electricity bills all arrive at the same time? Why are supermarkets not uniformly set out Australia wide? Why does my mother call at 9pm on a Saturday night when I’m burbling beer banter, sitting in a rainy ash covered pub courtyard somewhere and never at 3pm on a Wednesday when my eyes are rolling back in my head with boredom and I will do anything, anything to not write another word of this assignment? How do I go to the supermarket every day yet never have enough ingredients to make more than one meal that isn’t pasta, or toast, or spinach leaves with some sad tomato and mustard dregs? My anger usually dissipates when I’m wasting hours with my elbows turning black from newsprint or lying in a pool of sunscreen scented sweat dripping watermelon and giggling reminiscence, when the daylight hours have been many but the curtains are still drawn. Tell me what it means to be an adult, I plead with the plethora of overdue notices, the decisions that make my stomach twist and flop, the situations that leave me a wrung out dithering mess, because I still do not know.   

 When someone asked me how I felt about turning twenty two, my response was fuelled by a stream of cheap champagne. I answered with my mouth full of dip from the platter that I’d been dreaming about making for weeks, so excited I was to have a justification to buy expensive cheese. ‘I’ve never known so much,’ I declared, ‘but I have never known so little about what to do with that knowledge.’ I was quite pleased with how that sounded, believing it to be clever and prophetic, and repeated it several times over the coming weeks when people asked me about my birthday, even inscribing it in the notebook that was reserved for writing down things I wanted to remember when I was 97 years old and riddled with dementia. Trying being grown up on for size is a recurrent daily activity. Caught somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, forcing myself to try and grasp the concept of delayed gratification, of foresight without being suffocated by hindsight, shaking off the warmth of nostalgia and embracing the chilly unknown comes about as easily as constructing flowery metaphors after a semester of banging my head against a brick wall of statistics.

Am I real grown up now? I’ve asked, too many times to count, as we chit chat in pretty dresses, amongst the beginnings of lives so carefully but accidentally created. In the beginning there were milk crates with cushions, an old laminex desk and a basket for dairy. ‘Isn’t there something that should be in that hole?’ visitors asked quizzically. Long-life milk will never taste okay again. Even the purchase of a fridge after six weeks of sweaty cheddar and broccoli-in-the-pantry did not segway to functionality. Illusionary grand future plans, lengthy lists, strict budgets, forbidden chocolate, academic and social successes for every week of the year, melt and congeal into a barely recognisable puddle that looks a lot like 40 hours of work and two hours of idle study, eleven dollars for as many days, where I serve flat whites and  scrambled eggs every Sunday while willing myself not to vomit, phone conversations are had with a face buried in featherdown, Rihanna rattles windowpanes and the washing basket overflows.  

Then something happens to remind us of our mortality. I cried when I was watching the news, learning of a brother, a son, who would never go home again. Had he not died, his name would have never passed my lips: it was only in the wave of public mourning that I knew of the life wasted. I walked home in the shroud of darkness, the ebb of fear making me sneak glances behind my shoulder, my stare fuzzy with wine and the warmth of friends but still suddenly attuned to the things that are okay when you do it all those other times except for that once.

I do not always understand, when people envy me my youth. I make the same mistakes often, I want to say, I never have any money, I want to say, I lack certainty, clarity, stability, I miss deadlines, flights and birthdays and I am always graced with realisations long after the moment has passed. One Sunday morning I hobbled home with hollow eyes and a wrung out soul, stinking of cigarettes and of all the fleeting decisions I had made. I lay outside in the dappled light of the fading sun that afternoon and for the second time in a year wished for all things ordinary, for love, a vegetable garden, summer heat to wrap around me like an old friend. This tumultuous wave of life heaves me up and spits me out shuddering onto wet sand, nearly drowned every time.

Case and point, the realisation always comes after the storm, and the temptation to now recite cheesy song lyrics or to summarise in a neat and packaged cliché is overwhelming. While I ignore all the things I should be doing and faff about finding lost socks to put into pairs and writing ambitious To Do lists for tomorrow so I can justify going to bed at 9.30pm and watching Season 2 of Skins for the ninth time, I can see real adulthood hovering in some sort of illusive glass box just out of my reach. There’s a great danger if I grab at it suddenly it will fall and smash into a million smithereens. Best let it suspend there for a while, and I can say I couldn’t be happier about that.