The thing about being in the sort of suspended adulthood where you are still early in the years but not as early to be surprised by yourself is that you do things you never once thought you would do. And the vows you made to yourself as an adolescent seem precisely as they were: childish and immature. There are fewer things more fiery than the ideals of a sixteen-year-old. There are also fewer things as misplaced as it. Talking about this with a friend over the phone, I remarked how when you sleep with someone you only just met, someone you do not know and do not intend to see in the near future, it feels good only till the sun rises the next day. Then, you feel a hollowness with no parallels I can think of. To feel as if someone scooped a part of your very being out of you, like how you scoop ice cream out of a tub which does not have much left, when the Tupperware container starts to peek from beneath it all. It feels precisely as banal and mundane and unnecessary in the morning. The heartache of young adulthood felt more real and pure to me than the vacuous feeling of kissing someone I do not care for and whose name I would have forgotten in the drunken haze of a night at the bar. If given the choice, I would take the pain of unrequited love over a one-night stand, but then, it is what it is, as things are when you are in the suspended adulthood of your late twenties, so we take what we get.
A soft blues track plays in the background as I remember this conversation from yesterday, and as I wind down into a new night, I think of how these years feel like the moment when you’ve dipped your toes in the cold water for a while when you have begun to move towards the vast nothingness of the sea but quite reached the depths yet. You take a step towards it, and there is no other thought in your mind except you have left the safety behind, but you are not in the middle yet. You are floating with one foot in the familiar and one foot in the unknown. They feel like that, these years. Everything has started to lose its sense and surety. It has all begun to dissolve in the vast grey. And I have left myself to its devices.