I grow up reading that love is all sorts of different things. I crack open this book and find out it’s about sacrifice, I open that one to discover it’s about doing the Right Thing. An American movie tells me it’s the rush. A French movie chides me on its futility. A song wishes more than anything for yesterday. Yet another hates today. Before I turn the radio off there’s a man singing about being afraid of the future.

I grow up and (let’s be honest) I haven’t the foggiest clue. It seems one day there are eleven sorts of love, and the next that there is only one, and the next that there isn’t any at all. Of course, I write this now as if while experiencing such and such a fact it at all resembled fact. It becomes this in retrospect.

I grow up to find retrospect comes a lot quicker, now. I look back on yesterday like it is a five-year-old yesterday, and wonder if perhaps it really is that old; perhaps there’s more deja vu to the world at twenty-five than at seventeen.

I grow up and wonder what the big deal about growing up is. I want to be a child again. When I am a child, people say I’m full of potential, they remark on how I’ve matched the coloured men to the same-coloured cars, they are amazed by these small natural motions. And because I am not experiencing love or that thing I call love or that thing my lovers call love, the world is a plain stretching out in time and space over distances too vast to measure. And because I am not experiencing love, I am scraping my knees with impunity. I am very careful of my knees now.

I grow up, becoming lonelier by the minute. I am not alone in this sandbox, though I am alone. I am alone in this bed tonight, though I am not alone. I am steeped in a myth of the world as written in books. I am constantly destroying mysteries by thinking them through. I am loved, though I am not a lover (these sandwiches are love, this push out into the wild, this woman telling me to explore the world). I am not loved, though I am a lover (these veal cutlets aren’t love, this push into my apartment, this woman telling me not to lean over the edge).

I grow up because that’s what people do. And I have the life invented for me before my life had begun. I am wonder these days if this mould made me or if I made this mould; is it even possible to know? I am drinking coffee, I am drinking alcohol, I am smoking cigarettes, I am doing all those things I fine distasteful when I am young.

I grow up and realise one morning that I am going to die.

Tags: fiction