When I Turned 21, I Cried

When I turned 21 years old, I cried. I was counting down the minutes till midnight, till I officially ceased to be twenty, and became the magical twenty-one. And I missed it.

I looked up at my laptop clock to see 12:03, and I burst into tears. My last few moments of childhood had just been stolen from me. Or I threw them away. The last six minutes surrendered to random Internet nonsense. Rudely ripped from the mother’s teat and violently thrown into true adulthood. 

But why did I care about this abandoned moment? My best friend went to bed early on the day before her 21^st, because she had to wake up early for work the next morning. My friends at school have been busy writing papers, and not even noticed they were suddenly grownups till I raced into their room with the handle of Kamchatka demanding that they take a shot at exactly 12:01.  I enforced their celebrations of transitions between times.  And I missed mine. I had carefully counted down and guarded those sacred last moments for so many other people and then I fell off the pace with my own? Really?!

But I've come to realize, that my friends didn't notice the transition because they'd already surpassed it. They didn’t need a number or a time stamp to tell them to grow the fuck up. They had already done it. Slowly, surely, and for the most part gracefully, I had watched them become responsible, mature adults.

And while they glided through the proverbial adulthood door I was clenching the frame, clawing at the air of grade school simplicity and high school routine.

Perhaps I cried because within those last six minutes I had hoped to find a way to slow down time; to find the Peter Pan momentum that I had unsucessfully sought for my friends and wanted for myself more than ever. But I let it slip away. I didn’t pay attention to the minute details, and somehow missed seeing the last six minutes of the magic act when all is revealed. In losing track of the last moments did I miss the revelation that brings levity; that perfectly cinematic goodbye that makes the hole and also subsequently fills it?

I cried because I was mourning the lost six minutes of my childhood.

And that is perhaps the most adult thing I have ever done. Not the crying. The losing.

Instead of slowly watching the clock tick down I was learning. I wasn’t actually reading Internet drivel; it just felt that way at 12:03. I was in fact, engrossed in an article on the social implications of violence against women on therumpus.net. My grandiose and childish ideas of the magic of midnight on a birthday had given way to a thirst for knowledge about ideas and theories that are directly applicable to my life, and even more so, my future. I had subconsciously started looking for answers to my self-doubt and fear in the outside world rather than within the sheltered confines of my own mind and imagination.

I didn’t lose the last six minutes of my childhood; I willingly traded them away for something richer and more fulfilling: adulthood truths, rather than my own childish fabrications.

It appears my tears weren't out of grief, but rather cathartic release.

It's kind of weird.

 I cried when I let go of the door frame because I looked down and realized I could finally use my hands.