Growing up is hard to do

I'm on the edge of an abyss not knowing what's below but knowing the earth behind me is eroding faster than my feet can take me away. I'm a exotic bird the last of her kind realizing too late she won't adapt in time to save herself. I'm a child who's not a child anymore because she's too late to being a child but who's not an adult because adults are the people the children she no longer qualifies for runs to for answers and she has none. I grew up too fast and not quickly enough and everyone is further along but I'm right on track and I'm all too late and everything came way too soon. I don't fit in my young adult life and I've outgrown my golden throne of childhood.

I'm dramatic and theatric and think I'll rule the world tomorrow but tonight I'll cry and watch cartoons and scroll to see the lives of those more interesting than mine knowing they're just as much actors as I am. A century or two ago I'd have been slapped down with a hysteria diagnosis and sent along my way to start a family with a man twice my age who thinks my knowing how to read was ill-advised. Born less than two decades ago and I am a liberated woman paving her way in university, blessed with a financially strong family who can carry her on their shoulders til she carves her way into the world but this world is too far developed and too far gone and maybe my choices were those of convenience rather than passion but maybe I left my passion in the same chest as my dress-up clothes.

I'm poetic and desperate and wish for relationships I'm probably not ready for yet and I hate all my happy friends and their happy dating lives while they probably look at me with admiration for my freedom. My reflection in the mirror demands for the swift return of my rational mind but she went to die in the same university library that stole my confidence when I opened my first midterm mark and learned the golden age of the high school As has set for good and maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought I was and maybe my being in this school was a mistake and maybe the thousands of dollars my parents poured into my predestined future was all an error and maybe the greatness my teachers saw will fade til I leap into the sea of grey workers rife with uniformity.

In the city I moved to alone, the twinkling apartment lights looking like monsters's eyes when the sun sets and I go back to the dorm I fantasized for alone. I miss home but home suffocates me as it denies the independence my adulthood earned and when I'm home I want to go back and when I'm back I want to crawl into my mother's arms and see if they can cure my woes like they did when I was six and lost my favourite Barbie. I grew up so fast and I'm beautiful but I hate my face and my gangly limbs and I'm still a child except for by law and lack of space in my mother's lap.

I want to be held and read to and cared for and be small but I want to make out and be made out with and party and go clubbing and nothing fits and I hate everything but I love too deeply and break ups are too harsh and maybe not all my friendships were as impenetrable as I once thought and maybe some relationships really were just for high school. I miss the sweet, claustrophic high school halls but need the cultured, distant university grounds. I want to live downtown but rent makes me cry and I want to be trusted to design my own life but I want someone to just tell me what to do.

I'm a technical adult but I don't know how to be. I've outgrown my childhood but adulthood doesn't fit right. I'm liberated and lost. Friends I thought were forever moved on faster than I did and I'm alone but I'm not. I'm a contradiction. I'm an adult.