Apartment Brochures and the Concept of Time

Tell me why it is so difficult just to go in and out of Chuck E. Cheese, but three minors who happen to be completely broke can waltz right into an apartment complex and ask for a viewing. I mean, we only have a few months before we're legal...but honestly, the lady behind the desk offered us complimentary waters and cookies, took about an hour from her schedule and chauffeured three underage idiots around on a golf cart to look at their townhouses. We drive by children on tricycles whom we're not much older than, and past a shady looking man in his late twenties whose cigarette smoke envelopes his entire balcony as he talks loudly into a cell phone.

This is a strange world. Even more strange is how close it is. I could be a part of this (for only $1515/month! "In a prestigious community nestled just below the hills!") and I can be a part of this legally in less than a year. It's a matter of months. Break it down, and it becomes days. Hours. Minutes. This could be mine.

Age and time are strange ideas. Both just continue, unfalteringly, despite our negotiations, despite our hardships, despite our own power to change everything else about the world around us. It always keeps moving forward. And this is scary. This very day is lost now. It may have been the present today, but it is gone. What happened today will never happen the same way again. It is over. I will never have this day back. In fact, go ahead and cross this day off my life countdown. One day closer to whatever is waiting for me, one day closer to certain mortality.

It is overbearing, how easily people can fall apart. I already feel the fragility of my own body, and its ability to hold be back. And yet. I am locked inside this steel cage, heading off the side of a steep cliff. I ache and I find moments where I can't breathe and it's all so difficult to hold together. This fear of age is not helped by the fact that my very own mother has doctor's appointment scheduled for herself about three days a week, every week.

I'm scared of falling apart. I'm scared of pain. I'm scared of not being in control.

Sure, age seems alright now, me just being on the brink of freedom. But I don't want that. I never asked for this. I'm torn up, inside and out, and it only gets worse with every tick of the clock that sits so proudly at my bedside. As if it's waiting, gleefully, for me to fall. And this is reality now.