Britney

High school is over. High school is over! I have crossed into something else that is nothing like the crowded womb but not yet fully formed. I can’t even visualize “fully formed” because I do not think it exists. I know it doesn’t, and my recognition of that is what has lead me out of the crawlspace padded with exposed nerves.

I no longer get to write these every week and I suddenly stopped keeping a journal a few months ago. The acknowledgment of this is…jarring. The process of dissecting my day on paper has always been tinged with some tedium, but to look back and sift through details and moments that had slipped from my consciousness has always been a salve for the fear that I would lose the past.

I will be 18 on July 8. I do not think about this much, even when people question me about it. It is an empty thought that has replaced something much larger, too large. If I think about next year as something that isn’t a fountain but a spout, I’ll live.

I think too much about the future. I think incessantly about how the present will become the past, how I will miss it the way I miss things that were only a few years ago. I do not want everything to become old. A sign of a past life within a life. But I cannot change it. One day, I will grow older, and after that even older, and I try to tell myself this and accept it as inevitable but I am simply reintroduced to a state of something that I cannot compartmentalize. It looms. I am petrified by movement and petrified by stagnation. ♦