Wallflower

In saying goodbye to my hometown, I was also saying goodbye to my childhood. Sure, I was beyond ready to leave the horrid town in the dust, but I wasn’t quite ready to let go of my childhood quite yet. I was an adult, true enough, but it felt as if time had flown by to quickly and I had somehow left a few pieces of myself behind. I just wanted a few minutes to breathe and be completely put together before I made the leap out into the great unknown. The whole leaving home idea had sneaked up on me, leaving me completely unprepared.
I never had a picturesque childhood. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t exactly good enough to merit writing about it. It was much milder, less adventurous, and much more boring than those had in novels or screen plays. Though my hometown was a setting perfect for such a thing, I never took advantage of it. Though I caught an awful lot of crayfish when I was younger, I never went skipping through cornfields or jumping off a rope swing into the old swimming hole. When I got older, I never hopped in to my boyfriend’s old pick-up truck after he had just suffered an interrogation from my father prior to our first date. I never spent my Saturday nights in dark movie theaters making out with the gentleman beside me, paying attention to the plot unfurling on the silver screen. I never got “grounded” or had the keys to the car taken from me for a week or so thanks to something stupid and irresponsible I did without thinking. I never went looking for trouble; never partook in any wild parties, no drinking out by the lake around a bonfire whilst singing along to someone’s guitar. I was never the prom queen, never the cheerleader with the long blond hair. I had only gone to one school dance, my senior prom, and only because Finn wanted to go but didn’t want to go about the formalities of really asking a girl to accompany him there. I never suffered through the drama of meaningless high school relationships, and never really had my heart broken. I had played the wallflower card. I wasn’t the female lead, but the girl in all black moving around the set furniture and taking care of the props to make everyone else‘s lives easier. I often wondered whether more than ten people would remember me ten years down the road.
In regards to some of that, people have often told me how lucky I am to have by-passed the messy stuff, to sail through without obstacles. But I saw each one of them as little landmarks to growing up, rights of passage, and I had dodged each one of them some how. To me, it felt like to call myself eighteen and an adult was a lie. I was as socially evolved as a twelve-year-old. Maybe that was why I had such as issue with leaving this life and moving to the next one, though I wanted to so badly. It wasn’t time yet. I was starting something new when I was not yet finished with what came before. I was emotionally and mentally grown up, but in the area of hands on experience with life, I had many miles left to tread. I had felt like I had only been really living for the last couple of years of my life and I was just looking to make up for lost time. Sure, normal people whine and complain about how terrible their teen years were and that I was lucky that I never had to learn the hard way. But I didn’t want anyone else to do my growing up for me. I wanted to make my own mistakes. I had focused all of my energy living for the future, getting good grades so I could get into a good college and finally get out of this town and make something of myself, but I never really lived at all for the present. I got what I wanted, I was standing at the very beginning of it all, and yet that still wasn’t enough. I had focused on the destination, not the journey to get there. After all, that was what made a person. It was the most important part and I had forgotten about it. I had taken the Concorde, the quick and safe way, when I should have opted for the commuter, less fussy and more bumps to be felt along the way. In the attempts to prevent myself from making mistakes, I had made the biggest one possible and there was no way to turn around to do it the right way next time.