The Casual Art of Growing Up

She Lived in a Corner

There comes a time in every person's life when they realize they've stopped being a child. It happens at any age ranging from 13 to 17, and it hits you right in the face. You realize school has gotten harder, emotions have gotten more varied, and one day you'll look in the mirror and wonder when you got that face. Even waking up wondering about who you'll end up with, and then having the terrifying feeling you're probably gay. Nope? Is that just me? OK.

Personally, my favorite part has always been that people stopped self-censoring. When I was younger, I never heard anyone swear. As I grew older, they began to- and then apologized. Now they all cuss like sailors, and I along with them. 

It's just a few examples of how I have become an adult in the last year. I started going to an early college program, so all of my friends are adults. I moved out of the house to a small apartment close-by, I have jobs that pay for my food and my weed addiction, but, in all of that, it's easy to forget the simple fact that I'm 16. I'm young. Though the world treats me like an adult, expects me to act like an adult, and even though I LOOK like an adult, I'm not.

I'm not ready for this.

I have so much on my shoulders. A car I'm getting in a couple of months, a need for a steady job, exams, stressful friends, I even need to worry about where my next meal comes from. That's not something a sixteen year old girl should ever have to do. But it's my life, and it's the cards I have been dealt.

It doesn't change the fact I'm not ready.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not ready for what my best friend is holding in her hand. 

Whenever I'm around her we always do stupid shit. Last time it was smoking everything we could get our hands on, from weed to Twix bars. Stupid shit is what makes us best friends, but we've both agreed it's not for the best. And, looking at the small mound of pills in her hand, I'm feeling this more than ever.  

We're sitting in her junked up van, in the parking lot of my cousin's wedding. I'm in my floral skin-tight dress, and she's still wearing her red bridesmaid dress, hair done up in braids and twists. I wish my hair was still long enough for that. It was a rather funny experience. Two young girls in beautiful dresses, chain-smoking cigarettes and getting high off of pills. It's a weird contradiction.

"Eh, it's just Zoloft. It's not going to kill us or anything, right?" I look questioningly at her. It had been my idea to take it. Being around family consecutively for two weeks had stressed me out. I'd reverted back to a place where I wasn't allowed to be an adult. Nope, I was tiny Cassy, the little girl who hated to be hugged but loved chocolate milk. All I was allowed to be. If only my family saw me now.

I downed seven Zoloft with a chaser of sparkling grape juice, stolen from the wedding reception. They were all too christian for wine, which we had only discovered after smuggling three bottles into my best friend's car. Oh well, so it goes.

"Where to now?" my friend asked. I didn't know where, and I was pretty sure that we shouldn't have been driving. Anywhere.

You see, I didn't find out until later that hallucinations are a part of overdosing on this particular kind of anxiety medication. Yup. We shouldn't have been driving.

~~~~~~~~~~

"Do you know you ladies couldn't stay on your side of the yellow line?"

The cop peered in at me, and shined his light in the car, straight at my eyes. My bestie was too busy hunting around for the car's registration and her license, to notice that I was making direct eye contact with the police officer. Later, I realized how foolish this was. The seven Zoloft had dilated my pupils so much my eyes were almost entirely black.

We threw what papers and licenses we could at the man. But both of us were high as fuck and in no state to be talking to an officer of the law. He peered at the license for a moment, looked at my friend, looked at me, and said:

"Did you know you're an unlicensed driver after 10pm?

We were mildly fucked.

"Don't worry, I'll let you girls go. Just make sure to go directly home and never do this again."

Uh. What?

We were driving back, and we began to realize that entire exchange with the officer didn't make any sense. He wrote up no warning, he didn't run any of our registration, and I literally had the eyes of Satan and he didn't seem to care.

Also, I was vague;y aware that he had been teleporting between the cop car and our window. Wasn't his face too big to be in the window? What?

My friend paused for a moment. 

"What did he look like to you?"

"Short, fat, with a little mustache and weirdly blue eyes."

"Uh, Cassy, that man was tall and lanky."

"Fuck."

We then decided that it was a hallucination, we didn't know what happened, and to never talk about that police officer ever again.

As we began to drive back, my friend focusing on her driving as much as possible, and staying between the lines, which is a much harder task that one would think, I suddenly herd her scream from the drivers seat.

"CASSY THE TREES ARE MOVING. THEY ARE LITERALLY MOVING. WHAT THE FUCK?"

I could not deal with this right now. She was hallucinating again.

I couldn't deal with anything.

As I always tend to do when I'm high, my mind wandered. Right in that moment, my brain couldn't be there. Instead, I asked myself how I got there, in that place. Not only was I willing to overdose on Zoloft, it was right after a beautiful and loving wedding.And I may or may not die in the next ten seconds from a hallucinating best friend and a car crash.  It all seemed wrong. I was too mature for this. How did I get here?

How did I get here?

HOW THE FUCK DID I GET HERE?