Prose that may be too bland or too blue;
Random stories that may or may not be true;
All penned by Alice in her times of loneliness;
They shall aid the mind and heart of the restless.
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When I was younger, I dreamt of speeding up time so I could grow up faster. I used to think growing up would be totally awesome. I thought of life as a fairytale and of growing up as the happily ever after. Little did I know that, once you grow up, life is far from being over. If anything, life has just begun by then.
The chick lit movies of the early 2000s fooled us. Getting old is not all about shopping, dancing at parties, and falling in love with someone all day long. I mean, those films didn’t mention the countless sleepless nights you have to go through. Nor the six cups of coffee you had to swallow just to keep your legs from giving out from carrying the weight of everything. They said growing up would be da bomb; instead, it’s just a bummer.
No one ever told me growing up would be this lonely. That when I cry, no one would understand. That when I love, I would have to love secretly. That when I celebrate my small victories, I would have to do it alone.
While I grow up, the people I love grow older, too. They slowly slip from my fingers as though I had been holding their soul like sand all this time and I hadn’t realized it. My siblings got married and moved out. My old friends switched schools, and some got their first jobs at seventeen. My parents’ hair turns grey day by day, and along with it, their minds’ ability to recall distant memories fades as well.
I wish someone had warned me that it would be like this. So that I may have prepared myself even just a little.
I just turned nineteen last year, yet I feel like I am twice my age. The train of youth is passing me by quickly. Last time I checked, I was just sixteen, sweet and oblivious of everything. How did I grow up so fast?
Sometimes, when I lie awake in the night, my hypersomnia failing to pull me into its arms, I think of the future, like I always did back then, but this time, I do it with dread. I wonder how things will go once I turn twenty-five or thirty or forty. I think about the friends I would inevitably lose and gain, the family I would have to grieve one day, and the parts of me I would have to shed and kill in order to change and grow.
