#1: my twenties

I was going to miss you, dear reader, most of all about Kalamazoo. But then I realized that a.) not everyone who reads this blog is from/in Kalamazoo, b.) I haven't really lost you the same way I've lost Martini's antipasto salad, and c.) acknowledging how much I'll miss you sets up this precedent that you won't come visit, call, etc. vs. the precedent that you will come visit, call, etc, which I prefer to believe. So instead, I've decided to go the self-pitying route of bemoaning the loss of my twenties.

There's a magic to being twenty-something. Old enough to know better, young enough not to care too much yet about the consequences. Finally, enough expendable income to do some of what you want to do, yet your desires generally possess a certain modesty of scope that makes them at least somewhat attainable. Friends so close they feel like family, always ready for anything that smacks of an adventure. The kind of friends you can call in the middle of the night with the certainty that they will still be awake, and if they aren't, will think nothing of the fact that you're calling at such an ungodly hour. The interest people show in you as a young woman about to make up her mind to do...something, and maybe even something grand.

I could have lived out my twenties anywhere, and it probably would have been the same magical, transforming time no matter where I lived. I would have loved, been hurt, hurt back, learned, grown, laughed, embraced and been embraced, rejected and been rejected, failed and succeeded and dared the same way in some other town. It just so happens that I did it in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Kalamazoo will be forever the place I associate with that sweet and painful stage in my process of becoming.

It's probably good that I left when I did, because my twenties are over. If I'd stuck around, I might have tried to prolong them long after I was relevant. I'd be that sad, old person at the hip twenty-something party. I'd pass, for a while, but I'd know and soon other people would start figuring it out too, see me dancing to their music, drinking their booze, laughing at their jokes, and they'd ask "dude, don't you have better things to do with your life?" (which, they hope against hope, is a reasonable assumption, because they don't want to consider that they have seen their future and their future is me). I'd be oblivious to the fact that I was an anacronism, like those sit-com actors from the seventies who come back and do infomercials. Like those bands who get a new lead singer and try to pass themselves off as the same band.

Nope. It's time to sing a new song.