When I say, Things Are Only Beginning, I don’t mean it in some melodramatic wind blowing through your hair kind of way. Like in the way I can’t say I don’t have some degree of youth to my disposition. Like, your life doesn’t end at eighteen or twenty, that’s crazy but like—When I turned eighteen, I had this thought: The Memoir Ended.
I had the Really Rough Period and then I went to MSA and things chilled out, and I definitely felt it that I had to put it on a scrap of paper at my mom’s house that I’d randomly scrounged out of my notebooks.
To quote:
“So you reached the big 18! Or the simple 18. Now you can do things like get married and [redacted] but you’re still young. You’re not even twenty. But all the scary things that have happened to you… Being a teenager and surviving all of that—For the most part you’re finished. You’re at the point where the memoir ends: you’re 18”
And I think after I wrote that, like maybe a few months after or so… I was very solidly proven wrong. I can’t even look at that paragraph and feel the same I was proven so wrong.
Thusly, what conclusion can be made?
You go through the easy part to go through the hard part again, and probably after a few months or years you’ll go through the easy part again. That’s how it works.
That’s a grimdark edgy version to say I don’t think I’m gonna stop being the parts of me I put behind a pane of foggy glass, because no that’s not a window, that’s a mirror you’re constantly looking at until you’re 52. And then you’ll be fifty-two acting like you’re twenty-six. You get me?
Something’s ending. I surmised that a long time ago. There are faces I’ll never see, voices I’ll never put to a sound, etc. But hasn’t that happened already? I’ve gone through that before. I’ve enjoyed a song for the last time, and it didn’t mean anything. I moved on to tomorrow. So what’s the point of this blog?
The Death of my time at MSA is still important to me. I won’t clog your pores with it, but it lingers on my mind. The space this place will fill when I’m gone, made for me to search through old photos, happy and sad ones. The bitter tastes and the ones that remind me to call that person or send me a message. I’m taking blinks of time and trying to press them down like leaves into books, but everything disappears and wilts, no matter how much force you put into it. And May 16th will come, and I will be gone. Circle of life, circle of life.
I think coming to this point of my senior year taught myself I am a repeat of a repeat of a repeat, constantly rewinding and stagnating on the same spots. But is that not the toll of being eighteen? Is that not the toll of seeing the world with wonder, full of promise and punctuation, and then leaving with nothing more than a bunch of memories behind you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLaDksDOcE4
There are so many somethings left to begin, and so many somethings that are soon to end. And there’s something kind of scary about that, but also exciting.
Every age I’ve ever been has a mind full of memories just for them.
Crazy how this place was my life now in like two weeks I’ll never have to come back.