10/3/2010

Yesterday was a very, very strange day.

It started in a town about 20 minutes outside of Kansas City. If you'd told me three years ago that I'd be in Lee's Summit, Missouri a day before I turned 19, I might have laughed at you as obnoxiously as I could. That's what I tried telling myself as the day started off on a sour note. I wanted to harness the knowledge that I don't have a plan for everything these days and it's just good to lay back and just enjoy it.

That would have been a lot easier for me to do if I wasn't so paranoid about everything and everyone around me, but still I tried.

And for a stretch of about 30 minutes I lost my grip completely. I'm terrified of what will happen the day that I lose control for more than 30 minutes, but hopefully the epiphany/vision/realization that I'm about to describe will hold that off until I've hit the stage in life when I don't have anything to complain about.

I sat alone in my room last night from about 7 to 8. I'd anticipated going out and having a chemically enhanced good time, but those plans changed fairly suddenly and for some reasons I'm not aware of. At first I was really, really angry. One of those mindsets that could only be described as livid or infuriated.

Then I felt desolate. Alone. Homesick.

I haven't been homesick the entire time I've been here. I haven't missed an awful lot about Plano except my dog an my friends and family. I credit a lot of that to the fact that I've found a group of people here who I enjoy being around. I've already confided in some of them about things that I have trouble letting out to just anyone. I really thought that I'd found a little niche here, something I was scared I wouldn't find at all.

But suddenly, in the course of 12 hours or so, that changed. Suddenly I was sitting alone in my room with the whole world against me. I tried watching football with everyone in the lounge, but I just didn't find myself enjoying it. So I went into my room and, after a few minutes of sitting on my bed, I called my dad and talked to him.

That was about when I broke down. I wanted to go home. I wanted to sit on the couch and have my dog press herself up against me. I wanted to stroll lazily out of bed at some ungodly hour in the afternoon and make myself a quick breakfast. Shit, I even wanted to throw on a bleach-covered polo and go clean a meat market.

But then I got over it.

I can't really describe it any better than that. I was sitting down in my room, now with a group of people I can safely call my friends, watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall. At 11:59 I went over to my fridge and got out a bottle of Dr. Pepper I'd been saving, then I waited until the clock struck midnight and cracked it open with a toast to the room.

And since then, it's been pretty smooth sailing.

It might sound kind of bi-polar, but I assure you it's not. When the clock struck 12, I was hit with something that I apparently missed around this time last year: I'm an adult. Holy fuck, I'm an adult.

All of the shit I'd been stressing over for the previous few days were the problems of a child, a high school student. Almost as soon as I turned 19, I realized that I'm no longer either of those things. I don't need to be stressing about any of that anymore.

So I decided that I'm just not going to.

I guess I grew up last night.