Holly Haven Drive

I don't remember getting old.

I walked out of my room tonight and looked up these high ceilings and down at this cold floor; ran my fingers along the texture of this strange wall that isn't filled with my memories. I see an unfamiliar house like an unfamiliar face looking back at me. I have moved eighteen times in my short nineteen years of life; house to house, apartment to apartment. I remember my life in segments, like cell blocks in a prison. Each memory, each stage, separated in time. Separated from one another.

But when did I get so old?

As an eleven year-old little girl I remember walking down the hallway, looking up at the ninth graders and thinking "It's not fair. It will be forever until I get to be as old as them!" Now here I am, just a couple of weeks before my twentieth birthday, and my life feels so incomplete. And in the incompleteness, I can't seem to remember how I got here. Like I fell asleep for nap one day in our beautiful house in the woods in Georgia and woke up ten-years later in a house I don't recognize, with a face I'm not sure I know anymore. I look in the mirror and I don't even know my own face.

And it's in this moment that I realize that I have the answer to my question.

I have spent so much of my life loving people who didn't love me back. I loved my dad with all my heart. He loved his alcohol addiction and cocaine habit more. I loved my brother with all my heart. He loved pretty much everyone other than me more. I loved my first boyfriend to a fault. He loved his porn addiction more. I loved my second boyfriend with everything I had left in me. He pretty much just loved himself more than me.

I want my life back.  I want my fucking life back. I got old caring about other people more than I did about myself. I got old trying to fix them and support them and do everything humanly possible not to lose them. I got old giving a shit about people who were never going to love me back.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's the story. Maybe I will always look at my life in segments and the happiness I keep striving so diligently for will never come to fruition and I will keep looking in the mirror and being unsure of who I see.

Maybe that's the point.