Midnight Reflections

December is that time of month in a young girls life where she gets a year closer to not being young anymore. It’s me. I’m the young girl. December is my birth month and the older I get, the more I love that my birthday is during the most beautiful month of the year.

I used to hate my birthday because it was an inconvenience. People would always be out of town for the holidays and I could never have my birthday parties the same day as my birthday. 

I was a crazy kid.

Now, i’m going onto my last year as a teenager and I am terrified. What’s a girl to do at nineteen years old? As any normal person, I feel as though I haven’t achieved what my younger self pictured my nineteen year old self to be like. I don’t have the body I want, I don’t have the brains I longed for, and I certainly do not have the life I pictured. 

This is normal.

It’s my last and final year filled with teenage angst and I’m as riled up as any other teenager. I’m surrounded by people older than me and even my boyfriend hates to admit that he is officially a twenty-year-old man. 

Is nineteen the new ten for an adult? It’s like this double digit is haunting me until I go onto the big 2. 

Me? Twenty? No way! I know i’m way ahead of myself but that’s my life from now on. I am no longer going to be a psychotic fifteen year old girl. I am never going to be a sixteen year old with an image. I am never going to be a radiant seventeen year old girl ever again. Eighteen was supposed to be my year, the year that I was forever going to be. 

Can I really not blame my actions on my age anymore? No more ‘i’m only seventeen, I don’t know anything.’ 

I want to be forever young and stay forever December. I wish to stay stuck in time and if there was an age I could go back to, it would be seventeen. I cannot fathom that I am going into my last year as a teenager. My teen years were filled with so much angst, love, hatred, broken hearts, passion, fierceness, youth, and power. 

What will I be as a twenty? 

Once i’m in the two’s, I am officially just a twenty-year-old woman. Oh, that girl? She’s twenty. Ew.

What am I now? Who will I be once I am nineteen? Will I be powerful? Successful? Peaceful? Feminine? Divine? Every year i’m someone different, yet every year I feel no different at all until the next. Here I am, looking back at eighteen and seeing the beautiful wonders i’ve lost, discovered, and encountered. I’m grateful for her but I haven’t even gotten closure for parting ways with her. 

I don’t want to get older. I’m not ready to lose such a spectacular person, but I know it’s all apart of growth. Cheers to nineteen and another December of growth, love, and essence. I’ll remain here in my own personal wonderland, forever December. 

– A