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For the first seventeen years of my existence, I believed that life truly began at the age of Sixteen.
To me, Sixteen was the age at which I would experience things I had never experienced up until that point.
I wanted passion. I wanted excitement. I wanted complication. I wanted to make stupid decisions and get hurt and regret the risks I'd taken more than the opportunities I'd missed.
In other words, I wanted cliches. Because if you asked me to describe in one word my idealization of Sixteen, it would be that. Cliche.
Like most fifteen year old girls, I loved cliches. At fifteen, I was still the wannabe-intellectual with the slightly elitist but wholly unwarranted attitude that I have today, so I would never have admitted this love of cliches, to myself or to anyone else. I believed myself to be "different," and cliches went against everything that I believed "different" to be.
All the same, I found myself in the same place doing the same thing that most fifteen year old girls--"different" or not--find themselves on the night before Sixteen.
Sitting on my bedroom floor at 11:57 pm.
Staring at the clock on my computer screen.
Waiting for life to begin.
Ethan: emeryyyy are you awake?
The instant message winked at me above the taskbar, serving as yet another example of literary-like symbolism to fuel the unrealistic expectations that a hopeless romantic held for Sixteen.
Ethan.
Perhaps the greatest expectation of all.
We had met a few days before the beginning of forever, or something like that. A more accurate estimate would be six years before this disgustingly symbolic instant message popped up on my computer screen. I don't exactly remember how it happened, because the story seems to change every time one of us tells it. I do know that it
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For the first seventeen years of my existence, I believed that life truly began at the age of Sixteen.
To me, Sixteen was the age at which I would experience things I had never experienced up until that point.
I wanted passion. I wanted excitement. I wanted complication. I wanted to make stupid decisions and get hurt and regret the risks I'd taken more than the opportunities I'd missed.
In other words, I wanted cliches. Because if you asked me to describe in one word my idealization of Sixteen, it would be that. Cliche.
Like most fifteen year old girls, I loved cliches. At fifteen, I was still the wannabe-intellectual with the slightly elitist but wholly unwarranted attitude that I have today, so I would never have admitted this love of cliches, to myself or to anyone else. I believed myself to be "different," and cliches went against everything that I believed "different" to be.
All the same, I found myself in the same place doing the same thing that most fifteen year old girls--"different" or not--find themselves on the night before Sixteen.
Sitting on my bedroom floor at 11:57 pm.
Staring at the clock on my computer screen.
Waiting for life to begin.
Ethan: emeryyyy are you awake?
The instant message winked at me above the taskbar, serving as yet another example of literary-like symbolism to fuel the unrealistic expectations that a hopeless romantic held for Sixteen.
Ethan.
Perhaps the greatest expectation of all.
We had met a few days before the beginning of forever, or something like that. A more accurate estimate would be six years before this disgustingly symbolic instant message popped up on my computer screen. I don't exactly remember how it happened, because the story seems to change every time one of us tells it. I do know that it
