Norman Rockwell's 'Girl at Mirror'

Norman Rockwell's 'Girl at Mirror'

I am not a child, I am not a child. I’ve come home to my parent’s house for a weekend. My bed is different than the way I left  it when I was here last. My room has been re-arranged. The dressers are not full of my clothes anymore. Maybe this is a sentimental complaint, but these material changes are the proof of the immaterial ones: namely, I am not who I was when I was younger.

Finally, I share John Mayer’s desire, “Stop this train/I want to get off and go home again.” John, I am home, and yet I’m not at all.

My whole adolescent life, I’ve fallen into the “going onto the next thing” trap. The little girl wants to be the make-up wearing 16-year old. The 16-year old wants to be the college student, and the college student is constantly in career planning mode. I chase what I want and pray for time to move at an endorsing pace. I am the Scrooge of time, always trying to advance and never stopping to smell the peculating coffee (yes, due to the unsurpassable smell of coffee, that was an intentional replacement of “roses”).

Here I am in my quarter life, and trying to let go of what was, and live in what is. If only it were as easy to contently look at the mirror of the present, as it is to look at snapshots of the past and musings of the future.