save your sanity for later.

I'm starting to think that I mourn a connection we never really had. Did I make it all up in my mind, out of whole cloth, out of stardust and memories and wishes? Did I just fucking wish we had all that and so I pretended we did? Or was it real?

I don't know. I don't remember. And we don't have it now. So why do I hang on your every word like it's going to mean something—like it used to, like you used to mean everything to me.

I know it's a lie
I want it to be true

Why do I even keep talking to you? (Because I'm a slow learner who easily falls for a sob story?)

well if i tag it about him
then it's not really
all that cryptic then
is it.

My sister.

I have always felt she was the stable one. Most likely to succeed, least likely to off herself.

I am completely new to this concept of being the one who worries for other people. My friends are adults—in fact, I don't actually think I have any close friends who are younger than me, and the closest one in age then would be Alena, at 9 months and approximately 1 week older.

So. I am not inclined to worry about them. Mainly because, when an adult makes a decision, you assume it has some logic behind it, some internal merit, though it may not be visible to the naked eye. I assume I can assume these things, at least if the adult is mentally healthy, emotionally stable, not an idiot, and has not demonstrated completely shitty judgement in the past absent external factors. Ceteris paribus, I will also postulate that an adult's future judgements will tend to improve with experience.

(For example, it has been years since soshesays gave the finger to everything she knew and ran off to foreign parts, or, once, in a particularly bewildering move, New Mexico. This is not to say she no longer travels, but I would say she leaves far fewer burning bridges behind her. Hope you don't mind being an example, A.)

I have argued in the past against age being used as a universal description of maturity. I'm sure alchemi remembers being fiercely told that I am not a cheese!

I smile at that now. It's still true. I am still not a cheese. But I feel now how greater experience can lead to better judgement, though in the past I've paid lip service to the idea, the intervening years have taught me much much more of how much I don't know.

The ability to take advice, to recognize the value of others' input and work to comprehend a differing point of view, to judge your very judgements themselves... these are higher level tasks, therefore perhaps require a processor of greater age, greater experience, greater complexity.

We canonize youth, say it's wasted on the young, while perhaps ignoring the reasons why we don't let them do the same things adults do—because adult life is hard. Sometimes, maybe even a lot of the time, what society or life asks of adults is too hard for adults.

It's difficult, and it's scary, and it's complex, and it's tricky, and it's a tap dancing show tune revival on a mine field sometimes—just a bad idea all around. Countless experienced participants falter, fall, fail. Every day.

But every year, eagerly over the edge and into the fray, there they go, so eager, just 18. So joyfully racing and supposedly ready—for now, ladies and gentlemen, they are ADULTS. The passing of a birthday means they can make their own decisions! And make them, they damn well will—whether or not, I guess, anyone thinks they should.

And those who make bad decisions? I inquire after their fate not as a journalist in bored documentary fashion, but as someone who could've been the poster girl for hasty decision-making gone well... and then wrong.

I feel like I can see their futures: to be mowed down, WWI fashion, by debt, or illness, or bad planning or STDs or pregnancy, or snarled in tangled relationships or tripped up by 40 hours a week, five days a week, at the food court or in the call center or at the desk or behind the counter, asking if you'd like fries with that. To lose months at best, years, or decades, to fatigue, ennui, tending to their wounds. To give up and make their life out of what circumstances dictate.

I'm not judging; I can't stand back and say they deserve their fate because I just ... don't know. (I do know there's a reason it costs so damn much to insure someone under the age of 25—they do really stupid shit.)

I am not used to being the one who worries; I am repeating myself but it's too true. I was the one doing stupid things, making bad judgements, walking where a crawl would have been better, running full speed where a complete stop was called for—I was the one fucking up with absolute certainty I was doing what I should.

I said, I'm sure I did, I could probably find entries, I said I know what I'm doing, she says I know what I'm doing, and we, old me and now her, I can hear us saying it in unison in my head of now and the me of now wants to throttle us both.

You don't know ANYTHING, a slight exaggeration but god, to get their attention, please, just for one second, JUST STOP. LISTEN. THINK.

You don't, you won't, but we have to try because we care, damnit, we love you. Will you just——

The younger me, the now you, we claim blithely to listen but your words, my words washed in and out of ears with no more impact than one single wave on the sand. The words build a sand castle and the tide has barely come in before the waves smash it gone, no trace.

If she won't listen, or she has but she won't heed, and now she's 18—then I suppose it's her mistake to make. I guess, although I hate it, that I have done all I can.

I just wish her first lesson as an adult didn't have the potential to be so painful. I want to shield her from it.

I don't want her to have to grow up this way.

I've been informed I don't get to choose.

This bites.