At home, I am already older. A few friends sent text messages and emails, which arrive from tomorrow. A little time machine, my phone has timestamped them -- “Oct. 12, 2008.” Here, though, it’s still the eleventh, and I’m still a bit younger -- still seventeen.
How did this happen, so sudden? Isn’t that what we all say? I can’t help feeling as though this night should be a little more important, a little more celebrated than usual. The umbilical to home is officially snipped, tonight. If I wanted, I could smoke and gamble and get dirty magazines and sign my name to dubious sub-prime mortgages. I don’t feel too different, though. The days have that easy rhythm of college weekends, thick with naps and too much sun.
The week has been so idyllic, too -- chockablock with quick moments that hold the year pretty well. We’ve rushed between classes, sliding through bikers, skidded late into section with scribbled homework and a pencil [without an eraser], chugged coffee before lecture and worked late into the night, swearing up down and sideways that we would never do this again, that we would drop a class, that we would nap as soon as we got home.
This week we filled the Collective with new family, arguing late into the night and voting with hard eyes, then rushing out drunkenly into the night to bang on doors and chant and pop champagne until it felt like they’d always been here, close and comforable like breath. This week I drove the Solar Car, in awkward jerks in a dusty back lot, gunning it past the ProFro who was visiting. This week I went to Happy Hour, and flirted, and failed, and sulked, and got my ass pinched (who knew?). This week we studied hard and partied harder -- this week was pitch perfect, it was abominable, it was just fine.
Now we are waiting for friends to arrive so we can set out to the Row, lush in jeans and vintage tops. The girls’ earrings leave the sharp tang of steel in the air, and everywhere winter is falling out of the sky in welts. The leaves are curled painfully in the gutters, and whimper in soft scuffs as we brush them aside, faces bright and unseeing, laughing too hard in the night. We are not so young. We are older. We are the same we always were.
We make jokes about my age as we go. I demand things as the birthday boy. Someone says “birthday suit”. The puns roll on. We list the things I can do when I turn: vote, gamble, see porn, smoke... the list stops. Now and again, someone will look confused and sidle over and start questioning. I answer: “Yes, eighteen. No, not a freshman. Just a grade thing. Nothing that big.” They shake their head in the night air, as if to shake off the strangeness of it. We walk, we slap pavement, we forget.
I spend the night thinking about what it means to be older. Well, not that old, but older than usual anyway; I’ve tipped over the last ledge to majority. Not that much changes, sure: I’m still plane flights from home; I touch base once a month by text or email, or by phone, but even then I’m in a rush, nearly out the door, phone wedged in the damp hollow of my neck, dropping hard hints that I don’t have time for this. Yes -- we live mostly alone, mostly independent. I still drive when I need to, and drink when I want to, and sign things I’m asked to, minor or no. What changes, then?
If I’m honest, it’s the little celebrations. Guilty, but true. When eyebrows raise over my age, it’s an underhanded compliment, and though we’ve grown great at smoothing out ruffles and waving it off, it’s still pleasing. Terrible, isn’t it? Being young was my ace-in-the-hole, my saving grace in this land of Goliaths and Solomons. If all else failed, and I’d been outfoxed, outmaneuvered, outgunned... I could always slide my age in, offhandedly... you know, “nothing that big.” But starting today, I stick out less, seem more normal, less odd. In a funny turn, I don’t miss it. If you crutch around enough, you don’t mind standing up straight now and again. Starting today, no one really need know; starting today, even I don’t care.
*
As I finish this now, it is late on the twelfth. Late last night, everyone pushed me into my own private New Year with rum-spiced cheers and hard claps to the shoulder. And then, fanfare over, we got back to the serious business of forgetting our serious business. Faces began to glow hot and slack in light from fluorescent sconces. Arms, legs, mouths overlapped for seconds and subsided, confused. Even those on the edge of the dance floor bumped the air absently with their hips and ankles, rocking in half-forgotten fits and starts. Someone opened the door -- a shiver infects our edges. And everywhere, there was the small faith of fingers, just barely touching, just barely knitting us all together to the lounge. We trembled together. And if someone had ghosted in with the open door, and called our new names, we would have all fallen from the shock of it. We are not so young. We are older. We are the same we always were.
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