Those quarter-life crises
Quarter-life, and we are still gaping around like dazed babies. We are not sure whether trees are monsters, a challenge, or works of art. We choose art, always, and make them so. Snap pictures, add filters and voila! Van Gogh eat your heart out. We are magnificent. Untouchable. Complete.
We sit by the fire and watch our temperamental muses burning out. Fizzle, fizzle, pop, fizzle, fizzle. Squinting into each others souls we believe we are philosophers because once upon a time we cared enough about that tree to wonder if it really did fall. Our hypotheses are well and truly set alight and one hundred miles away birds keep dropping out of the sky from our forced exhaustion. But it’s okay, at least our toes are a pre-cut and packaged toasty warm.
The birds keep flying and flying and we, we are activists. Social. Political. Artistic. Awake the feminist! Free the prisoners! Write a poem! And send a belated 7th birthday card to the Shri-Lankan girl who made our new fast-fashion shoes.
Quarter-life and everything is new. Buses no longer take us to school. They are a symbol of the travel card we must top up and the car we will never quite own. We stand under bus shelters, our socks wet, and think, what for?
“Free money! Free money!” a grey-faced woman shouts as she throws down paper-plastic medical cards from the fourth floor window of her nine-to-five prison. “Free money! Free money!”
The clever ones lap it up while those scared of paperwork, documents and dole queues paint black circles under their eyes and forget to worry about next weeks’ rent.
But, we are one in the same.
We never judge others. We never judge others, but we laugh at the grey-faced woman in spite of ourselves. We are in our twenties, full of colour, and free! On Monday nights we polish wine glasses for the masses and in the morning we scrub fermented grape-juice scum from the the bottom of chipped mugs and pop two paracetamol to make it happen all over again. On Mondays, she drives her Micra from one prison to another, stalling in traffic, as we freewheel our second-hand bicycles down hills, ignoring traffic lights, safety and decorum.
We are a quarter of the way there and we park ourselves in coffee shops sipping lattes and inhaling nicotine. We spend three quid on some hipster’s latest venture and in three days time we will wish we spent it on pasta, but still, we sit and sup and listen to the wonderful half-life humans who are still children at heart and hope that we will become just that.
We delay. Delay deadlines, bills, and life.
We fight for justice. We fight injustices. We fight for our reproductive rights, terrified that we might become mothers from our own stupidity, someone else’s stupidity, or one gin and tonic too many. We fight for the freedom of our bodies, of our womanhood, of our wombs and choices. We scream and shout and stamp our feet, make posters, chant slogans, paint our faces all the colours of our blood and throw no rice for the 12-year-old bride whose wedding invitation we didn’t receive.
Whose wedding invitation she didn’t receive.
We talk about political correctness. We take offence and deal it out in equal parts. We ask why stereotypes are the shadows that follow us even in the darkness. We go to music festivals, arts festivals, pagan spring, summer, autumn, winter festivals. We don headdresses and paste bindis to our foreheads and turn a blind third-eye as we dance the dance of cultural misappropriation.
We run. Quarter-life and we have discovered responsibility. A self-consciousness incomparable to our teenage years. We realise that we are a percentage. That everyone is a percentage. We are somewhere between best and worst, first and last. We are somewhere. We are aware. Shockingly, statistically aware. Our phones autocorrect our misspelled attempts at adulthood confirming that we are not the same. We run. We run and run and run. We run and we are beautiful, insufferable, maniacal.
Quarter life and everything is new. Everything is new, and still, we run.
