We're Getting Older

All my life, I've wanted to grow up. Which is funny, because when I was younger, I also wanted to be Peter Pan. Conflicting interests, no? Anyway, I'm finally at the stage where I'm considered an "adult" and now, all I want to do is crawl beneath the covers and lock all the responsibility away behind some closed, heavy, and extremely bolted door. Everything I do from here on out matters. And not even in a small way. In incredible and big and irreversible ways. It's all coming to a point. I can feel it closing in on me. There's this voice in my head, and it's telling me I need to "take action" and "do this" and "do that" and "make everything tangible" and it's getting stronger. Every day. And I'm freaking out. I'm actually, genuinely shaking from the inside out, because I am so damn terrified. Tonight, on the phone, my dad broached the subject of graduation, and what I thought my immediate plans might be, and that was really the only answer I could give: the immediate plans. Because I can't project what's going to happen within the next few months. For the first time ever, I'm actually walking the tightrope without a net. Things like grad school, leaving the country, staying in the country, chancing our failing economy and getting a shit job, getting an internship and hoping for a better job stemming from that, finding an apartment where the heat works and the water pressure's good and the ceiling isn't about to collapse and the landlord isn't about to up and fuck off to god knows where, obtaining health insurance...these things are so close I can touch them. Being happy. That's another one. That's the thing most on my mind: how can I maneuver everything so that "happiness" is not just another thing I put in quotations--not just another concept left to the imagination--but an actual living, breathing thing I can hold and call my own?

Here's a photo I took my first year of college that I rather like, even though it has no real personal significance to me. I used to like the café it's set in, but crowdedness and bad music has kind of put a damper on that whole bit. Ah well: