I spend a lot of my time thinking about how, next year, I'm going to be twenty. Even eighteen seemed quite young, being an adult was still far away, something in the distant future that I wouldn't have to worry about for a while. I enjoyed my bits of freedom, and let growing up wash over me in a lazy wave that struck every now and then, but never too often.
I still haven't learnt how to drive, or acquired an ID card. The only form of identification I possess is my passport, and my school ID card, that makes me feel like- well, like a school kid.

I realised why, sometimes, people refer to college and university as school when it isn't school. It's holding on to something that has been so important to them. My sister just got to fifth grade, and she's so excited about using a pen to write. I'd have thought "Yeah. A pen. Big whoop.", but I remembered how excited I was as well- being a fifth grader, being allowed to use a pen- these things were signs of growing up.
And now it all seems to overrated, this getting older thing.

I know I'm old enough, but I don't know for what. On a peculiar level, I actually appreciate it now when mum barges into the room at 4 am in the morning and asks who I'm on the phone with, when she refuses to close my door and makes fun of the word "privacy", when she tries to force feed me and when she tells me where I can and cannot go. 

I have, what, four and a half more months till I'm entirely responsible for myself. Where I go, what I do, who I meet, what I wear, my timings, my choices, my friends. I have yet to decide how I feel about all of that.

They don't love you like I love you.

It beats in surrendered corners and
in shreds scattered through the wind and
In ashes that fed the bonfire we lit and
(It was never so bright before)
within us.

An inkling of the cracks,
this is the surface too but
it's just inside, I'm just here, but
it's unknown to you and
you are within me, deeply
as I am outside the world that
is you.

Wait, they don't love you like I love you.

Reach out and extend arms,
inward please, not out,
but no- that's not right-
You can't reach in,
And I can't come out.

I'd explain it if I could, tell you why I write these morbid little monologues about things that were and will come to be. But my job is to reveal how it feels, and not why- ironic, because I'm the ever-unfeeling, the posterchild of heartless and faithless and hopeless. These things you attach to me, without ever asking me to give you a penny for my thoughts. It's too expensive a bargain for most people, especially in these times of recession- our hearts are emptier than our banks. We'd much rather cut forward than let the weeds of our pasts shackle our ankles and drag us into the inky black of memories. What's in it for me?

That's one that always evaded me.