Illustration by Sophie Kenyon
I wish to be young again, wishing to be old. Telling my younger self answers to questions I long to hold… “Oh! What is it like for…um, no one to tell you who you are to be?” I’d rather have that than decide at the mere age of twenty-three. “You’re a big people now! Don’t you get, you get to play ALL day?” True, about ‘all work and no play’, but Time’s tired eyes have something different to say. “How do you even know what to do? There’s billions and billions and trillions and-” *picks nose* I’m following a path that a fourteen-year-old picking Drama over Spanish at too young chose. “(giggles) No, I don’t want to guess. How old are you?” Old enough to move out yet young enough to stay, and you shouldn’t ask me that, it might be a little rude. *wink* I watch the years blur, wince through gritted teeth as they roll on my screen. No longer do I lie about being born in the early 90s to verify that I’m over eighteen. “But please please please tell me that you’re living our dream!?” It’s the one out of all of the questions like these that binds young and older me together at the seams. Even though youth is far from gone, it feels like I’ve met limbo, an in-between, until they decide if I am too old to chase ghosts of what I used to want to be.