This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

She was twenty-eight and in the middle of wedding season, which was exactly like bar mitzvah season, only you had to pay for your own outfit and present.

What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence. There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a vague nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old-crone-hood, like the woman at the end of Titanic.