The greatest part about growing up is that things stop becoming unique: leaves falling from the trees; the first smell of September on that first day of school, with depleted freshness unlike that which we wake up with on that first day of Summer; friends drifting away; a much-needed paycheck deposited into your bank account the day before a bill is due; the life once animating your stuffed animals; the first inhale of your cigarette after a long day, or the first beer after a long day, and a combination of a bit of both; or the first time the one you thought would love you forever no longer loves you.
Yes, the greatest part about growing up is that the leaves no longer fall from the trees with any novelty; every day smells like September; Christmas becomes just another day; friends come and go; money runs through a sieve like water; your stuffed animals become lifeless; the cigarettes start to kill you, the beers begin to taste stale; and there is never a first time for heartbreak, but always a last.
The greatest part about growing up is that a cheap replica of The Starry Night hanging lopsided by your bedside by the edge of the nail misaligned with the canvas becomes inundated with meaning designed by nothing but your own thirst for seeing it existing somewhere carved out for something beautiful.
Fortunately we become older, less mobile, with aching bones and a yearning for nothing but rest; or a deep sleep with that one dream that you wish would keep you forever. The nightmare is that we wake up at all to resume the physiology of aging, the dense somatesthesia of ripening and expiring; but that once we are awake to accept our condition, we become content with our senescence.
If we were to stay young forever, would our endurance last? or would we break under the splintered prospect that this becomes any easier tomorrows later?
My license expires in 2027. I will be 30. I remember what I was wearing and who I was with. It was a cold February day. I turned 21. I went out to celebrate with friends who are now gone, in a city now unfamiliar to me, that has discharged me from its graces like a bacterial infection from its wound.
I am farther from my friends now, enclosed within four walls within a house surrounded by dead corn in an open field of cracked soil and decomposed manure. I am alone.
Goodbye, New York.