the adults

May 27, 2013 candacemorris 0 Comments

Joel swooped up the kitty while I heated water for a french press.  We stood in the kitchen, still as yet unready for the day, I in my sweats and glasses, and he in his wool sweater, socks, and fabulous second-day hair.  As he stroked a very happy cat, and as our child bounced independently in her baby-holding-contraption, I wished the moment could last forever.  I wished our children selves could see us now.

Not the children of our childhood, but the children of our twenties.  The pre-adult adulthood.  The time where writing a rent check felt new and exhilarating, where eating out was the ultimate in luxury, where our dingy apartment with its newly acquired wedding whisks and second-hand pots and pans felt like a slightly larger version of playing with dolls as a toddler, where it still felt a little odd to not have to obey a curfew, where you could eat a pint of ice cream for lunch if you wanted to.   This time of life felt like something we were playing at, trying to convince our parents and our friends, but mostly ourselves that we were now responsible, no longer a burden to anyone's pocket books (or at least had a plan to be solvent), no longer keeping anyone up at night with worry.



A time when being grown-ups felt like something we played at.

Despite this time being fraught with anxieties, insecurities, heartbreaks, and attending an ungodly amount of weddings, it was somehow slightly easier to find perspective.  Of course, we knew there would be a time when the magic of being adults would fade and jobs would become necessary, where our money would be spent repairing roofs and paying off school loans instead of on concert tickets or old volumes of poetry.

This morning, as we stood in the kitchen, I had a flash of that magic, that too-rare feeling that we are young and just starting out, on the cutting edge of music and fashion, feeling like we had more than enough time for plenty of dreams.  Joel was working from home and I wondered if he felt eager to return to his to-do list rather than linger in a kitty-petting moment, if he felt interrupted and anxious rather than happy to all be living this hour in the kitchen together. I hoped not.

Then I looked at him and saw the child-man I pledged my future to love.  I saw his cascading long hair, his naked face, his mischievous eyes, his ability to linger in happiness. I wondered how we got to feeling so grown up; I started thinking of my friends and wondering if they ever had the privilege of feeling the exhilaration of their own childhood informing their new life.  Hoping it wasn't all obligation, work, children, bills, and cleaning.  Hoping the worries hadn't entirely dimmed the magic.

Sometimes I am still seventeen, driving Keri's VW Bug without a license, singing The Joker so hard my voice hurts, feeling the full beautiful danger of being almost grown but not yet women. I have only $5 to my name, and I'll use it at Taco Bell.  We'll spend the evening getting ready for youth group, and I'll wear something short to show off my amazing legs, tantalizing those good Christian boys as only a good Christian girls can do.

It's so good to feel young.
It's so good to be grown.