Here’s To All That

Written by Molly Goodrich | @mollygoodrich

I’m not sure when I became an adult. I’m still not fully convinced I am one. 

It must have happened slowly, absently, somewhere in between actually turning eighteen and the sneaky trick of time that has led me now to be twenty-one. Because somewhere between crying to my father the day of college move-in and now, nearly one week out from graduation, there is a small possibility that I grew up. 

There is something sort of magical about these precious late teens and early twenties, balancing on the never ending tightrope of child and adult. The way we are all trying to figure out the rules of Life together, a complicated board game of twists and turns, a guidebook that nobody can purchase. I took in the warmth and protection these years have lent me like a hand-me-down coat from an older sister, allowing myself the time and space to grow and be dumb and twenty.

But I have outgrown this time period — the coat is so tight that I can barely stand to raise my arms. 

Here’s the secret nobody will tell you: everyone still secretly feels sixteen. Nobody feels old enough to be out on their own. We all still wish there was a Real Adult who would tell us what to do sometimes, even if we resented our own parents when they still did. We cry on birthdays and feel nostalgic for a time when life didn’t feel so hard. I will tell you now that every birthday still feels a little bittersweet. I imagine that feeling won’t ever go away. 

You blink and your first September in college becomes your last. 

I was eighteen and The Common felt like the Champs-Élysées. I would scuff up my favorite white shoes at my first party and nearly gag on my first shot, turning my face to the side so nobody else would be able to tell. I would change my major three or four times those first few months just because I didn’t get the first story I pitched, convinced I had somehow made some irreversible mistake. I didn’t feel like I had enough friends, and then felt overwhelmed every time I went out. 

Past me: breathe. You get the pitch. You find the people you want to keep close. Nothing and everything will work out, but you still get up every morning. You find your coffee order. 

Boston was sticky in late summer and almost unbearable in the winter, but I embraced the way the cold made me feel. That first January the wind chill made my cheeks grow so red and numb that I almost thought I might not ever regain feeling in my cracked lips.  Every winter my hands would bleed from the cold. I still would never buy a pair of gloves. I’m still not entirely sure why.  

If time is of the essence,  that clock has not stopped ticking lately. I have become hyper aware of every moment slipping away from me, and I find myself grasping at it in a last ditch effort to make time slow down. I’ll take the long way home just for one more chance to trip on the out of place bricks, stare at the skyline and the river and imagine myself jumping in. Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was getting lost in subway stations?

You close your eyes and suddenly you’re nineteen again, on the floor of your friend's apartment. The wine is bad but the company is good so you stay around. Those moments that feel insignificant might not be concrete. You may not always remember the rules of the card game or the creak of the floorboards or how out of breath you felt walking up the hill. But you remember the way your chest grew warm from feeling like you were a part of something.

Once, in the back of an Uber on the way home from a party, in between giggles and inside jokes that have long passed my mind now, the driver looked back at my friends and I and said, I’d give anything to be nineteen again. I wrote it down in my notes on my phone, the timestamp reading 1:49 a.m, and laughed about it later. 

But I think of the crack in her voice, how sincerely she must have meant that. I am only two years removed from that time in my life, but I think I get it now. 

The world will feel like it’s ending every night before you go to sleep, but you still get out of bed in the morning. You’ll walk out of a classroom for the last time and pack up everything you own in suitcases. You’ll move to France and change your name and finally cut off that person you always swore you would. You’ll romanticize the way the leaves look one last time and wonder where the last four years went, those moments now just television static in your mind. 

The days ahead look warm, though. I can almost see it now.