my heart is breathing / for this moment in time

Sometimes when I don't know what to blog about, I ask my friends for ideas. "Write about the bittersweet passage of time," Caitlin told me, half-jokingly. As if I ever write about anything else.

Seventeen is strange: right now is strange. With only one semester of high school left, it feels like everything is ending. There's a finality to every moment, a sense that every day is laced with lasts. My heartbeat is a countdown, a time bomb, and I stopped saying goodbye a while ago. I never meant to but maybe it's easier this way.

I feel like I'm prematurely mourning the loss of my childhood. I just keep thinking: this is it. This is all the time I get here before I graduate and go to college and everything is different. One semester and a summer, half a year or so. Give or take. I just keep thinking about my house and my neighborhood and my city and how someday, it will be "the house I grew up in" instead of "my house." That makes me kind of sad.

I've already lost some things. Taz, the cat we've had since before I was born, died a week ago. We had to put her to sleep. And it's weird that she's not sitting on the couch like she always is. I don't know how long it takes to get used to things like this.

I don't want to grow up. Well, I do and I don't. I want to go to college and travel around the world and meet new people and get a tattoo and a dog and mostly just not have to be in high school anymore. But the future excites me so it also terrifies me. I mean, being a teenager may suck at times, but it's comfortable. It's fairly predictable. It's all I've really known. And, I don't mean to be bitter, but I feel like life still owes me certain teenage experiences. I still need to slow dance in the gym to really cheesy songs and kiss someone in their car and sneak out of my house in the middle of the night to lie in a field and look at the stars and I definitely can't grow up before I attend a wild party in someone's basement and drink beer stolen from their parents' and stumble out the door before the cops show up as some song with an incredibly loud bass makes my heart beat a little faster than it should. Why haven't those things happened to me yet? What the heck, life? You have approximately six months to get your act together.

In all seriousness, I'm very okay with the way my adolescence has progressed and I know that not only am I still quite young, things don't happen at the same rate for everyone, and also, life will never be like it is in books and movies and musics. This is possibly (definitely) the greatest tragedy of my life, but it's okay. I have my own story, remember?

I'm sorry if this turned out kind of depressing. I guess all this stuff about ending is kind of sad but it's not all-consuming and it's all going to be all right, really. I'm taking things one day at a time, better than I used to. I'm soaking in this strange time in my life as best as I can. School sucks but lunch time with my friends doesn't. Laughing in the car in the morning doesn't. Listening to Jack's Mannequin while running through my neighborhood as the sky turns the prettiest shade of pink doesn't. So that's what I'm going to remember.