Waiting.

We find ourselves waiting for many things – the weekend, our next birthday, graduation, our first job above minimum wage. As we sit and wait for these things to happen, our lives are being lived without proper participation or consent. We are found in sweat pants, with a blank stare and sweaty feet, waiting for something to happen, when all sorts of things in all kinds of places are happening while we wait for something to jar us into taking notice.

I will be 25 in two months. That’s five years away from 20, nine years away from 16 and five years until 30. By all definitions, I am an adult – and I hate it.

We should be governed, prodded and haunted by the ghosts of our younger selves – the parts of us that didn’t care what color our hair was or what size our jeans were – when we were simply happy to be alive. The better versions of us all, that would ride rusty bikes with flying streamers way past the time of night when the first street lights can be seen coming to life row by row, hoping to get in one last ride around the block before we heard our mothers calling for us.

Before we stopped doing and started waiting.

There once was a young girl who loved to read. In her modest southern California bedroom, wallpapered with posters of Kirk Cameron and River Phoenix, she would sit and read until her fingertips grew numb from holding the book in her hands, and her eyes would cross from exhaustion.

One afternoon, engrossed in her favorite tale, “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,” she began to cry. She cried, not out of sadness, but out of frustration because she knew that she never would be able to live a life as fantastic as the ones she visited in the stories she loved. She cried because she did not have a secret door in her closet that led to mystical forests. She then decided that if she could not live with these characters in these places, she would write her own stories and create an imaginary life for herself. So she did.

Starting out small, with a simple poem about seagulls, she named a bird after herself and wrote about it flying high up in the clouds so high that it could never come down. It made a home for itself in the sky. She created other characters to keep the gull company and told of their travels together into distant territories.

Feeling as though she had a knack for writing, the young girl promised herself that she would grow up to be a famous poet and adventurer and never, ever have to work an office job or do algebra. She promised herself that she’d always wear corduroy pants and carry around a leather camera case filled with treasures, like the one the boy carried in the movie “Time Bandits.” She most assuredly would have all of these things and more, once she grew up.

And then she grew up.

And she’s still waiting.