There’s a reason all the songs are about being seventeen. The movies too–Ladybird and Juno and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This is a special year, everyone says. You’re on the cusp of becoming, the quicksand of childhood enveloping your feet.
The year I’ve been seventeen, I’ve read 40 books, dyed my hair six times, went to three states, and got my driver’s license. I’ve also been accepted to Oregon State University, so come next fall, I know I’ll at least be somewhere.
I would rate this year a 7/10, which is the highest I’ve rated a year in a long time.
I turn 18 soon. My birthday is 12/21/07. 12/21 is a palindrome, the winter solstice, and a day that, without fail, will always rain.
What’s nice about having a birthday at the end of the year is that I get all my anxiety about getting older and time passing out
in one go. There are 10 days between my birthday and New Year’s Eve, and as far as I’m concerned, I don’t exist then.
I feel startlingly neutral about turning 18. I’m not sure if I should be more anxious about it.
Eighteen means: no driving restrictions, and I get paid $7 more per hour. I can sign myself out of school and buy a lottery ticket and sign up for the military, and get legally married (I have no interest in the last three).
If I lived in Mexico or Europe, I could drink, but Ronald Reagan has dictated that Americans should have a milestone birthday at least once in their twenties.
I’m not big on birthdays, but 18 is a big birthday.
I still feel eleven years old. Maybe that’s the effect of the pandemic. I’m permanently stuck in my sixth grade art class, making paper stars before they announced over the loudspeaker that our world would change forever. My body has grown up, and so has my mind, but I don’t recognize the face in the mirror.
This is what an almost-adult looks like, with a mood ring and a pair of worn-out Converse and the keys to a 2010 Lexus on an orange mouse keychain. Her roots are grown out, dirty blonde and auburn peaking through faded black box dye. Her jeans are frayed from the pavement.
Everything behind me feels so far away. Sidewalk chalk paintings in first-period art class last year, and the summer I was 16 and spent every night climbing the trees by the train tracks with my best friend. The 7:30 a.m. 33 bus to Venice Beach. My old school uniform.
It’s like I came to life on a Wednesday in August. Woke up in a body somehow too big and too small. I can’t ride a bike. I don’t know how to dance. I don’t do my homework. I say everything I think. Too loud, too quiet, too unsure, too unsteady.
I never thought about the fact that I would be a grown-up one day. I have friends with fiancées and babies and apartments. The kids I babysit just learned what a billboard was. I feel so old. When did I get so old?
There’s an Alice Cooper song about being 18, and a One Direction song too, plus a handful of vaguely perverse ones about being barely legal. But there’s something important about being seventeen. Every movie, every book and TV show and magazine has built up to this point. I feel like I’m a caricature of what I’m supposed to be. Sitting at a table by myself at a high school dance and swaying to the music at a party where I don’t know anyone. Driving up the PCH with the roof down at sunset, doing my makeup in the bathroom sink.
Everyone I used to know has moved to San Francisco. I took down all the posters on my ceiling. There are constellations of holes where thumbtacks used to be.
It’s just beginning to solidify in my mind that this will be the body I inhabit for the rest of my life. I never thought about what I was growing into this entire time.
Growing like a dandelion, through cracks in the pavement, before the wind picks up and scatters your seeds. Maybe this is why the girls in songs are always seventeen.
I feel so restless. I feel so trite. I feel more myself than I’ve ever been before.
There’s a box of CDs in my backseat and 3 bags of old clothes I need to take to Goodwill, but I’ve been putting it off. Someone wrote the lyrics to The 1975 on a bathroom stall in Highland Park. Last week, when I drove down my old street, I realized the green rusting truck on my neighbor’s lawn had been there officially longer than I was.
While I’ve been gone, these places have continued to rebuild and regrow and rot. These blocks will only grow more unrecognizable.
I am approximately 22.5 percent lifespan complete: I have all the time in the world.
Briefly, for a minute, I feel so seventeen.
Seventeen playlist:
“The 1975,” The 1975
“Anthems for a Seventeen Year old Girl,” Broken Social Scene
“Seventeen,” Sharon Van Etten
“Edge of Seventeen,” Stevie Nicks
“Dancing Queen,” ABBA
“Cigarette Daydreams,” Cage The Elephant
