life is long

I felt for the very first time today that life is long.

It is a very abrupt and distinct sensation. Food doesn't taste as brightly as it once did. I know a lot more useless facts that are part of the ritual entry into adulthood - these guardians of the status quo and I nod at each other in mutual understanding of our shared monotony. Oh yeah, we all know about the Soviet Union. Sweet. The places that I know so well - train station, office, bedroom - are just places through which my body moves, having no real interaction with the space I am in. I never pause to look at the sky anymore; why bother looking up at the mess of suffocating gray clouds? I am now in the long slog of adulthood.

I feel the break from childhood palpably. I feared this moment my whole life. I spent the twilight of my teenage years signing you can't be twenty on sugar mountain and was terrified of the day when twenty would arrive. But twenty didn't come with any large transition, no kick in the ass to get off the mountaintop. Just more brightness, even more brightness and excitement, really, than I had ever had in my life.

Going to Rome and my subsequent travels staved off adulthood for a few years, I realize now. Oh so THIS is what everyone means when they tell me to become an adult! Food tastes like cardboard now, and life seems long. Like an endless hamster-wheel of death. We go through these motions again and again, these behaviors we learned so very long ago that have now become the rote reality of our existence. We don't think, we just act. We wake up with the alarm, morning routine, commute, sell our bodies for money, eat to stay alive, come home and schedule in relaxation and pleasure time.

It makes me feel tired. Or the opposite of that, like the spark for life is being extinguished. Like I have so much energy, so much joy, joie de vivre that is being pulled out of me by this thing called adulthood, by this long-life-syndrome.

I watch all the other people who move around me, and I wonder if they've resigned themselves to this too? Can I be the only one who feels it, or are they so far gone that they don't even remember that they've forgotten?

I will not resign to this thing that is called adulthood but should more appropriately be called the trap of death. I refuse to have a long-feeling life. I refuse to wake up each morning and think oh, right, this again. I will not surrender to this crap. I will not live any version of my life but the most fantastic, brilliant, heartbreakingly luscious one. Time to start planning the escape.