When We Were Young

I miss the days when we were young.

And I don't know why we tried so hard to speed through it all, blindly claiming a title of "adult" that I'm still not so sure that we understand. But we graduated college, and there was really no time taken to just enjoy what we had stumbled into: the real world, as if we hadn't been living in the real world before that. I remember sitting on the phone as we tried to figure out how we would pay our rent with the job that we had taken just to ensure that there would be money in our then-hopeless accounts. We decided that we wouldn't worry because the odds were in the Mayans favor, and we wouldn't have to live much longer past our graduation if we came up short.
In a surprise turn of events, neither ever happened. We lived on into 2013 and even in the months that the bills seemed to be beyond our control, there was something that happened that made it all work. And even though I never said anything to you about it, I know that your parents helped you out that one month when your tire blew out right on the interstate. It was still all too new of a place for anyone to come to you, so you sat on the side of the road and cried. You cried about the tire and the money and the loneliness. You cried because you wanted to go home; not just home but your bed, the one you grew up in with the wooden spindles you'd trace with your fingers as a child. I know how you felt because I felt the same way, and I called home, too.
Sure, we struggled. We never expected not to, but in the middle of all of that I wish we had taken the time to realize just how beautiful that struggle was. We were always chastised for saying that our generation was special so we took those moments as a punishment; we made them into something that was supposed to teach us a lesson without realizing that maybe after all, we were special. It had nothing to do with "our generation" or the generations before us that apparently struggled harder than we ever could have imagined, going here and there uphill both ways. It had to do with us, and the only promise that we would go on to make about our experience is that we would never try and make our children feel as small as we did. We were special because we made it. Everything else was just a bonus.
We continued through our twenties, landing jobs applicable to what we actually hoped we would do, and most of the time, it surprised us more than it surprised anyone else. Eventually, it meant less to prove ourselves to those around us and more that we actually did something that we secretly believed would never happen. In the meantime, we made fun of our friends back home that would get married, without ever willing to admit that we might be jealous. We might be doubtful. What if we had stayed back and chosen the path that seemed safest? Wouldn't it at least be a bit easier if we had someone with us along the way? There was no time to reconsider though; we made the decision we did, and you know, I wouldn't go back and change it. It made me have to look at myself in the mirror and be content with the solitude. It was just me standing there, and I had to be okay with that. We all did.
In all the hardships that we faced, the moments that came in between seem to have erased them from my memory. Of course there's still fragments, but can you say that they really mattered in comparison to the rest? People in their twenties are not supposed to go to Italy, but it was what we wanted, so we counted noodles out of a box for a while. A couple tablespoons of tomato sauce, and that was our dinner because... soon, we would be eating real Italian pasta. And I'm not sure how we pulled it off, but we did. We made it happen because we promised ourselves that we would. We wouldn't settle for the fates that had been determined for us because, deep down, we knew that we wanted more. I don't care what anyone says, we deserved more. So we took it by the throat; we choked the life out of it. All of our dreams did not come true, but isn't that why you dream so many of them? Surely, we thought, if we made a list a mile long we would be able to accomplish at least a handful.
Look at us now. You've moved into that house in the subdivision, and you got married, even though you said you never would. Kendall needs braces, and it's completely bullshit that it costs about as much for those as it did for us to leave the country. But I guess we have the kind of jobs you need to pay for stuff like that. And I'm waiting for the final manuscript to come back from the publisher, and as much as I've loved it, I miss the days that I would hungrily sit in front of the computer and write that blog. No one picked it apart; my words were only up for my scrutiny. No one was asking me to put it down and come to bed; there wasn't a dog scratching at the door to be let out. And in the darkness of a computer screen gone black, I begin to see the slight wrinkles developing on my thirty-nine year old face.

Do you know how long it's been since we met up for Italian food? I miss it. I miss being young. I just wish that someone had reminded us to stop trying to rush though. I wish that we hadn't been so stuck on the ideals of growing older. I wish we had been reminded more often that the world was at our fingertips. Maybe it still is.

Sure we're too old to be on the Olympic gymnastics team or to have someone buy us liquor because we're underage, but I sometimes wonder what we're missing by looking so closely at the past. We haven't missed it; we've just been looking in the wrong places.