All Grown Up

by Jami Attenberg

It’s not that you want a baby, or want to get married, or any of it. It’s not your bag. You just feel tired for some reason. Tired of the world. Tired of trying to fit in where you don’t.

“I think I’m just going to be alone forever,” I say. I am starting to get upset. “It’s fine if you want to be alone,” she says. “I don’t know if I want to be alone, I just think I’m going to be,” I say.

“You don’t have to be with anyone. It doesn’t define your worth,” she says,

I can’t stand when a meal is ruined. I have slept with many men, don’t ask me their names, but I can’t eat anything casually. Don’t fuck with my food, I want to say to him.

Whatever thrill I had in perfecting my job is now dead, because perfection itself is boring; it’s only everything leading up to it that’s interesting.

After our teenage years the game is over and we’re all just holding on till death.

There is not a person alive who doesn’t want something from me, I think. There is no action uncalculated. Nothing is free. Nothing is pure.

But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don’t want to get married: they don’t believe you. They think you’re lying to yourself or you’re lying to them or you’re trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse just for telling the truth.

I cry for the lost idea, the lost concept. Sometimes I cry, too, for who I was as an artist and what my life could have been like if only I had kept going. I weep for my lost identities. I weep for my possibilities.

For so long I have believed I could never catch up, but now I realize there’s nothing to catch up to, there’s only what I choose to make. There’s still time, I think. I have so much time left.

“And worst of all, what if you don’t know what you like at all? What if nothing sticks? Then you spend half your life wondering what it is you’re supposed to be doing next. What happens after that?”