Milo
NOVEMBER, 2022
Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how many times I’ve been called in from recess while still being “it” in tag. And I wonder if it’s some sort of lingering thing or if that identity dies with tag once it’s adjourned. And I know there were countless times where we said that we would come back to it the next day, only to start a whole new game. And it reminds me of the notes I forgot in my third grade recorder concert, and the feeling I got when they moved my class from the playground to the blacktop, watching my dad play Minecraft on the Xbox with me and thinking he was the best player in the world, and how I had my last Christmas pageant with Martha never knowing that it would be.
When I’m reminded of these things, I’m reminded that this present moment is the last time I will ever be this young. That I’ll be twenty soon, which might as well mean I’m twenty five, or thirty, or one hundred years old, here one day, a skeleton in a museum the next. But right now I’m nineteen, and walking the line between feeling like I’m four again and feeling like I’m fifty, and I’m not sure how that could be.
For example, when I moved into my first apartment and was responsible for keeping myself fed, I learned that you can only make so many sandwiches before you run out of bread, so you go to the store and buy more bread, and then you make more sandwiches, and then you run out of cheese, so you go to the store to buy more cheese, but you get disgustingly excited by the four for five sale on yogurt, so you forget the cheese and have to go back, and by the time you do all of that your bread is expired. So I gave up on the healthy eating dream, instead opting for Mac and Cheese shapes, chocolate chip cookies, and microwave quesadillas, my personal breakfast of champions. On one hand, I was feeding myself something, but on the other hand, I was not doing it like a “grown up” should. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.
The dissonance between the past and future is heard in other ways beyond abhorrent culinary decisions, like seeing a gift that your old friend would have adored, and then remembering that you guys don’t talk anymore. Remembering that you haven’t seen nor pet your childhood cat in ten years and how it felt when you said goodbye. Coming home to an empty room when all you’ve known your entire life is a loud house and a crazy family. Moving into an apartment by yourself and not feeling settled until you put your childhood stuffed animal, Milo, on your bed, and knowing that’s enough. Not because you decide that it’s enough, but because it needs to be enough.
I’m still trying to figure out the people who say they know how to do this whole growing up thing. Because I feel like I am both the counselor and the camper trying to navigate the world both wanting to mow the grass and run in it barefoot. The one setting the bedtime and the one disobeying it, hiding under my covers, playing Pocketfrogs on my iPod. One side keeps me safe, one side keeps me sane, yet somehow they’re seldom in agreement.
So for every step forward I take, I’ll read a book or listen to a song written by people who have gone through the same thing and remember that I am not the only one who is confused, tired, anxious, and perpetually nauseous. And I’ll hope that maybe one day if I’m lucky enough everything will be okay in the end. As for right now, my goal is to get through the day. And sometimes it’s hard when all I want to do is to sing my ABCs and know my time tables and have that be enough, and sometimes it is enough because it makes me remember that I am still young. Call it Peter Pan syndrome, call it coming of age. I call it growth and I call it life. And for me, right now, that is enough.