Macaroni Adulthood

To those afraid of growing old. To those afraid of stagnacy.

Here we are at the cliff's edge of another turmoiled year. The end of the blistering reality of filling in college applications taking on the mutated form of clay abominations and considering job prospects that feels dissolving to the psyche like acid rain on our hesitant face skin.
Wasted away the suspended-in-toiling-seawater year taking a break from one hundred and forty-four months of institutionalization, sunbathing beneath the popping grained gauze of a sepia-coloured summer, lemon bleached, and vignette edged. Pretentious.
The idea of a whistling salt-sand air, chilled watermelon pulp young adult summer that we know nothing about but spend so much of our lives romanticizing.
There are more contemplative, kid-frightened years ahead for us to touch with the black ink hands of an academic dissecting a pimpled, moss-backed toad in science class, for us to touch with jelly-kneed anxiety and the contorted mask of blind optimism.
But this year (while it is still here), while it still remains the popsicle stick bridge between make-believe adolescence and macaroni boiling adulthood, this year feels rushing and raw like we've got only this moment left of it. Left of our seemingly infinite lives.