Sometimes You Are 22

Sometimes you are 22 and you do not know what 23 feels like, and you are not certain you will ever reach next year and you are afraid. And you look in the mirror and you do not look like 21 anymore, but you do not like what 22 looks like most of the time.

Sometimes you are sitting in your room, waiting for the phone to ring and dreading the voice on the other line, and you wonder how you got from 16 to 22 and you cannot remember the good parts of the years in between. You are often driving to work in the rain and hoping you will crash on the way there, not because you would not miss your life, but because you cannot bear the thought of slogging through the muck of it for another day (even if it would mean coming out stronger on the other side).

Sometimes you are 22 and you are reading books about your illness and they are telling you what to do, and you do not want to listen even though you suspect they are right, often precisely because you suspect they are right. Sometimes you do not want what is right. Sometimes you only want what you want, and most of the time what you want is wrong. But sometimes your 22-year-old body craves what other 22-year-old bodies crave, like whiskey and cigarettes and 2 o' clock in the morning, but your body is piloted by a sick brain and you cannot trust that you will survive what other 22-year-old bodies can survive.

Sometimes you are waiting alone in your parents' house. Sometimes you are waiting there for years at a time. Sometimes you wait so long that you cannot remember what doing feels like, only the absence of doing and the slow decay of anticipation. Sometimes you are a still-life, a mere depiction of yourself and you do not know how you became this shadow person. You only feel the haunts of touch and emotion and sometimes you are so raw that you bleed sadness, and sometimes you are so numb that you have lost all memory sensation in your skin.

Sometimes you are crying. Sometimes you are laughing, and you do not understand how the two can coexist side-by-side in the same body. You are often a mix-up of feeling too talkative and feeling too angry and feeling too much altogether, and sunlight is too bright and everything is too much. Sometimes you are so much that you cannot breathe anything but your own scent.

And then sometimes, something changes for a moment.

Sometimes you are 22 and you are amazed that you have survived 22 whole years. Sometimes the right song plays and for only 3 minutes and 22 seconds, you feel okay. Sometimes you are 22 and you feel 22, and you go outside for the first time in 4 days, and you count your 10 fingers and 10 toes, and you remember why you decided to see the sun today in the first place.

Sometimes you are 22 and you are drowning.
Sometimes you are 22 and you are living.
Sometimes it is a toss-up.
Sometimes it is worth the risk.