39 is such a non-age….

I’m going to turn 39 in a few days. 39 is the most non-age that I have yet experienced! Think about it…you’re no longer in your mid-thirties, in fact you’re at the very end of your thirty-something. You haven’t yet reached the “BIG 40” – that blessed and cursed point at which you can legitimately throw-over the whole thing and decide that it’s far better to just live and enjoy than to worry and fret. And you’re exactly 20 years away from the most perfect age your life has ever known: 19.

Why is 19 the perfect age, you ask? Well, because! Consider that at 19 you are old enough to be out in the world living on your own to a certain extent making your own decisions without your parents imposing a curfew or a set of arbitrary rules, but you still have your parents to fall back on and no one really expects much out of you, yet. The responsibility factor is relatively low: you’re still too far away from college graduation to be expected to know what you will do afterwards but far enough away from your high school graduation that you have some perspective on all of those childish shenanigans. Somehow, at 19, that Junior guy who was the only one to ask you to your own Senior prom – the one who accidentally dumped his drink all over your dress and somehow still managed to step on your feet while dancing with you at arms length – is becoming a fond memory that you can laugh at. At 19 you can still go to frat toga parties and drink until you start bazooka barfing without ruining your job prospects (unless somebody posts pictures of the aftermath on MySpace or YouTube and even then you might be able to cover it with an HR type with the “Hey! I was only 19…” moniker!); you can bring that hot guy back to your dorm room for the night with the understanding that you are both far too immature for it to mean anything; you can *still* change majors and it won’t cost any extra college tuition and you’ll finish on time; you can still believe that the world is basically a good place where good things do happen to good people.

At 19 your whole future still lies in front of you. Presumably you haven’t been married yet, you haven’t had kids yet, you haven’t been fired from a job yet, you haven’t been hurt yet, you haven’t been jaded yet. An awfully big set of assumptions, I know, but I suspect it’s basically true for the vast majority of young people.

At 39 you find yourself looking in the mirror each morning and wondering just where the hell 19 went?? Hey! Nobody asked me! If anyone had told me that that whole future that I had ahead of me at 19 was going to disappear in the blink of an eye perhaps I might have taken if a bit more seriously. But instead I let it slip down the rabbit hole. I find myself seeking it; chasing it; stalking it like a cat twitching its tail around the corner of the hallway, 19 just barely in sight and out of reach. I swat out in a desperate attempt to catch it, again, thinking that just like Peter Pan’s shadow my 19 and I should merge back together as naturally as the snow melt swirls and joins with the sea but much to my chagrin 19 is far more elusive. In this future of marriage, divorce, career failure, children and uncertainty 19 always seems to have run far down the path checking it’s watch and exclaiming that it’s late, it’s late for a very important date – a date with my future.

-NettKitten