you won't be sixteen forever

These past few days have been kind of emotional for me and I don't know why. I guess it was mainly just stress and my tendency to make big deals out of things that aren't big deals and smaller things triggering feelings of inadequacy, but sometimes you just fall apart and you don't even have a good reason.

This morning in physics instead of paying attention to the lecture on forces and equilibrium like a good student, I wrote three pages and played pretend that that my science notebook was my diary. I wrote about second chances and secrets and things that weighed on my mind, trying to talk myself out of the seemingly purposeless unhappiness that was clouding my head. And because I'm sixteen and I can get away with not caring about consequences beyond the short term, I don't regret it.

When you're young, you can get away with stuff like that. You can get away with crying over dumb things and getting emotional over pop music and spending too much time worrying about homecoming dresses. You can get away with texting your friend seven times in a row before she can respond and going out to the parking lot at lunch to watch people attempting to drink a gallon of milk in an hour throw it all up. You can get away with executing dumb pranks to the amusement of your friends and writing long journal entries about everything and skipping the second half of the workout to just lie on the track and talk (or listen to people talk, if you're more like me).

You're allowed to do those sorts of things when you're young: dumb things, silly things, things fueled only by what you feel now without any regard to the future. I guess when you're grown up, you can still do some of it but there's not the camaraderie of teenagehood, not the excuse of, "oh, I'm still just a kid."

I just think there's something kind of nice about this weird stage in life. Everything is exaggerated; bad news is the apocalypse, good news is the happiest moment of your life. One could say it is both miserable and magical. Beauty through the pain and whatnot. Writing about it, though, I feel kind of strange, removed, like I'm looking back on this time of my life instead of living through it, like maybe I'm not supposed to have this sort of level of introspection yet since I don't have the hindsight. I don't know.

I mean, thank God we do grow up. I'm just not particularly in any hurry.

It's like that one Metro Station song that came up a few nights ago when I was listening to playlists on 8tracks and feeling moody. You won't be seventeen sixteen forever and we can get away with this tonight.