Bitter Sweet

by Hattie Williams

Sometimes I slept with men I met in pubs or at parties on weekends, fell in love with them immediately, and scared them away just as quickly. Sometimes I took ecstasy and kissed my friends in the corners of dark rooms in strange houses with no idea of how I’d get home. We’d indulge our comedowns the next day with Bon Iver and Bright Eyes, dreaming of the kind of love those men felt, and wondering if we would ever find anything so iridescent and beautiful. Nothing was permanent.

They had this way of talking, like the world was going to come to them eventually, so why shouldn’t it just hurry up and do it now?

We were all completely unremarkable and our life was simple. We found color in all of it.

Whoever said university didn’t prepare you for real life was wrong. This was essentially a study-group discussion with a checkbook.

What I understand now is that teenaged girls are often fantastically bored and frustrated by not being allowed to experience the real, adult world. Parents and rules and laws insist on keeping them children until they turn eighteen. Much of their understanding of the adult world comes from pop music and films and television, all riddled with tragedy and drama.

I’d feel like a little girl, not a professional woman, not an independent adult. Every heartbreak, every flu, every birthday and Christmas, it would hit me, and it would, I guessed, for the rest of my life. I am a child, and I want my mum.