exercising my literacy

Not in Kansas anymore.

I think there's a movie where a 13 year old wishes she were older, then wakes up to find herself the 30 year old Jennifer Garner.

I've never seen the movie, but I feel exactly like that (though I wish I looked more like the movie star). It's as though I'm merely playing pretend. Each morning is a day of dressups, another game of "doctors and nurses".

Ebbs of adolescent life peak out like a child's toes as he plays hide and seek. My real age is given away by the state of my bedroom, still a teenage squalor in the confines of childhood pink walls. My journal entries are still awash with immature preoccupations, crushes on boys, anxieties about life. I still think of life as "when I grow up", as some far-away goalpost that in fact I'd long crossed.

Concurrently I'm aware of how my life, as a 23 year old, "ought" to be. And not merely as some abstract societal expectation, but fulfilled in the actual lives of my friends. Living yardsticks of cohorts getting married and buying cars and signing up for mortgages and moving away to London and New York and Hong Kong.

But the real test of how old I think I am... there's this boy in this gelato store - he's so sweet that every time I go I leave grinning like an idiot. Then the other day it occurred to me, hey he'd probably be about 20. It took considerably longer for me to remember that I was 23, that the whole exchange was pretty paedophilic on my part, that I didn't see myself to be any more than 19.

Between the realisation of being old, horror of my mental cradle-snatching, and a burdening feeling of being trapped in this adult body and job and expectations, la vita (or the gelato, for that matter) no longer seemed as dolce as the little store proclaimed.

posted by me. @ 9:30 PM