“What’s to come, is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff I pray will endure.”
– William Shakespeare, with help from Me
Reader, what an intriguing enigma is age. I felt older at the ripe age of sixteen than I did at eighteen, and oft have professed that while less adolescent in nature, I am remarkably less sure of myself at twenty than I was at nineteen. It has on several occasions dawned upon me that I may have reached my highest form at the sweet age of seven.
In making such declarations, however, I do wonder what it means to be “old.” There was a time when anyone whose height surpassed my own was considered an authority figure, and to those persons I would speak with a deferential addition of, “ma’am” and, “sir” to the ends of my sentences. Now, as I stand at sixty-four inches (nearly sixty-five), I am forced to wonder evermore what it means to be a grown-up, an adult, a person in a position to which I ought to concede; or an equal, should I myself be believed to have joined the ranks of the responsible world.
For a writer whose hero is none other than that infamous devil Peter Pan, I must confess I am in no hurry to linger in the age of almost-twenty-one. These final few months before that hallmarked birthday arrives are surely a sort of humilating torture in their own right, for it is an insufferable affair to be regarded as a compeer by one’s fellows until forced to divulge the truth – that one has not yet escaped those wretched in-between years of being an adult on paper and not in practice.
There is such a chasm separating the years of twenty and twenty-one, a crater that stretches far beyond the obvious implication for American youths that the sound of the midnight bell may finally be accompanied by the popping cork of a bottle of champagne, legal at last. A twenty year-old is an adult whose indiscretions may be excused, but every day as a twenty-one year-old is a day further weaned from the bliss of idiocy.
I long for the additional regard that numerical title may afford me, and yet, as sure as I am unsure about time itself, I know I have been blessed by the heavens with a deep appreciation of my youth.
Reader, to be young is a brilliant thing. To be young is to be beautiful, utterly striking, in a world of likewise handsome people whose smiles are alluring and movements electric. Youth is fabulously arrogant, a cocky cocktail more addictive than the tentative success it serves. To be young is to be stupid and mark oneself as brave, cowardly and claim the attribute of maturity. The world is for the young to conquer, all they need do is take it, and see how easily the armies of the old fall. Any contradiction, any resistance, any words of reserved “wisdom” are nothing more than the lingering foolish practices of a dying generation, the prophecies ordered by the dead and attempted to be fulfilled by those that will soon follow.
Ah, Reader, to be young is to possess more intelligence than one is capable of managing. It is to build bridges from seafoam, and expend each day washing away the sandy footprints made the day before. It is to hold an astrolabe while swearing on one’s proficiency with a compass. It is to wake and sleep with each minute crawl of the sun across the sky. It is to be drunk on sadness and high on joy. To be young is to live in a way never again reclaimed, for once experienced, a person soon learns the fallacies of a once-indestructible world.
I do not, of course, subscribe to the belief that the age of twenty-one marks a sharp decline toward a geriatric life. Twenty-one is, by all accounts, very much a year belonging to the still-foolish. I do, however, greet each setting sun with the knowledge that as the stars rise higher into the sky, so is my relationship to youth that much more muddled. Youth, which I would never like to allow beyond my grasp, but whose yoke I would gladly shed for the praise of my superiors. How inexplicably curious is such an inevitable circumstance.
I wish youth upon your heart, angelic Reader, and the wisdom of the old upon your beautiful mind.
Love,
Lettie Anne