half-life (light me up)

I am quintessential beautiful youth. I am every emancipated minor-major. I live in a ruthlessly nondescript third-floor attic apartment in a village just outside the city. No beach. Some grass. Plenty of cars.

Village? Well, shopping village. And there's a library, and a handful of historic-trail parks, and a needlecraft shop, and every different kind of takeout cuisine. I can walk. I do walk, to the bank, when it's sunny and my time theft allots it. I haven't lived here in the summer, yet.

(Winter is a hard first season, isn't it? And life must follow, regardless.)

But I only go out when I'm with someone. When I've successfully contrived the necessary rationale for applying my stored credit card number to order merchandise, I systematically dispose of the packaging as soon as possible. I vacuum, and I mop, and I maximize the efficacy of taking out the trash. My shower contains no more than half a dozen items. My bedroom, with its slanted wood-panel wall-ceilings, has inoffensive vinyl hardwood flooring, and I haven't installed a pink fuzzy rug. Plenty of posters, though. Perhaps someday I'll feel truly kitschy.

I have a whole second bedroom with three unique closets, and I don't use it. It remains occupied by upwards of seven dead flies and the occasional ladybug. Even so, my rent is cheap. It's not as if I absolutely couldn't afford otherwise, but thank goodness.

One cannot achieve romance via commodification. One cannot achieve inner beauty via external love. I love this place, but I hate it. It might even be deemed a bit of a shithole. And it's a first apartment; it should be.

My neighbors are a bit creepy, but if you haven't got the neighbors to complain about, what have you got?

I don't go to the library. I don't have a selection of quirky workaday tote bags lifted from the local thrift store. I have several secondhand pairs of shoes, but I'm not sure they ever take me anywhere very interesting.

(Perhaps the point of life is that anonymous moment of connection, when someone gushes over your shoes as you stalk through a department store.)

I have knit a sweater (off-the-shoulder cropped and lacy, for me) and a pair of socks (handsome self-striped crew, for my dear, dear adoptive grandfather) in this apartment. I have started a second pair (a bolder colorblock of the same stitch pattern, for his wife) and the last pair I had knit (plain stockinette in a gorgeous gray-tan, for a dear boy who left for the mountains and work) was with yarn bought from the local shop. I will be back again. I may work at the library, in time - that is to say, at a desk, or maybe even at the circulation desk after all.

I have eaten meals I devoured, and just once, I had to toss cherry tomato scrambled eggs that took my esophagus to a place it did not wish to go. I used to have a recipe journal, and then I weaned myself off of it. I haul my boring groceries up the stairs in reusable bags and delight in the play-toys process of restocking the fridge. I have severely damaged my mental skew between food and finances. I have eaten ice cream straight from the carton, many a time.

I have had haircuts. I have tried to cut my own hair. Eventually - and I know this, friends - I will buzz it. I will meet stylists chatty and bored. I will tell my story over, and over, and over again. It will sharpen and mellow, each time.

Time. Always time. Ticking. Clicking. Time.

Other people my age are having more fun than me. I know it, I know it - they simply must be comparatively unencumbered. They are more beautiful and they are more special and they are more, more, always more. They do not have the pervading problem I have. I believe this. I know this.

There are taxes, of course. There's the gas station, of course. There are emails, emails, always emails. Everybody pays a mortal mortgage, if not rent.

My wife is a beautiful, wretched work in progress I can only hope to support. Cohabitation will not half make panacea.

And this half of a life I am shy of six months through living, with career stability and musical mobility and not half the stones to get out there and live a little...it, too, is crumbling. It can only sustain so long.

One cannot achieve modern romance without commodification. One cannot achieve inner beauty without ever having experienced external love. I hate this self, but I love it. It might even be deemed a bit of a fuck-up. And it's a young adult; it should be.

I don't mean that it should be easy. It just needs to be worth living for.