Like silk slipping through my fingers

I should've listened to my mother. I should've gone into medicine like she had and like and half of my family wanted. At least I'd have a stable job by now, instead of wondering if I should learn new skills to apply to one hundred more job listings from a market that gets even more over-saturated with each days that goes by.

When people ask my age, they always seem surprise to learn I'm thirty —thirty-one this November—. They always say I look younger, not a day over twenty-four.

"Thanks," I answer cause what else can I say?

"I just don't like going out in the sun." I offer when the subsequent question is "What's your secret?"

They almost always laugh next, and wonder whether my black clothes are part of my vampiric uniform. With a faint smile I joke back and say they are unrelated. "For the record," I add. "I love Italian food so no, I don't dislike garlic."

I've never been afraid of growing up, that is one trauma that wasn't bested upon me by my judgemental family. I never got into having extensive skincare routines in the hopes my face doesn't catch up to my real age, because extensive routines mean spending money and I'd rather spend my disposable money on an overpriced latte and hair color than on serums and toners I know I'll forget to apply, so sunscreen will have to do.

Sometimes, though, I do feel deep in my stomach the anxiety that bubbles whenever I feel like I haven't done anything that day or ever in my life, like I can feel the silky touch of time slipping through my fingers while I try and fail to catch it's stream with my slow hands.

The breeze caresses my bare arms as I rest against my headboard in the middle of a summer night. The rains from the last couple of days have kept the temperature down and as the skin on my arms begin to tingle from the cold that begins to settle into my skin, I debate whether I should close the window or perhaps a sweatshirt would suffice because I'd very much rather allow the air into my room.

I've always liked the stormy weather of summers in the city; the heavy, rhythmical sound of the rain hitting the roof of my house late at night has become calming and comforting with time, perhaps because it brings back memories of childhood and worriless days between school years. After a decade or so of drought, I welcomed with open arms how much the sky would cry through out the season.

The metal of my laptop has become unbearable, not because its too cold or too hot or because suddenly it became to heavy to sit on my lap, but because it's there without being used; the open document remains blank in front of me, reminding me of my procrastination. Even when the exhaustion begs me to sleep, I refuse to close either the computer nor my eyes because I'm more terrified of the time being wasted than of the effects of an improper sleeping schedule. So naturally, I stay up doing neither.

Deciding it to be a good idea, next day I decide to torture myself first thing in the morning and so I open a job hunting app on my phone to scroll through several listings of positions I'm not qualified for, that seem like a scam or are not in my area. Frustration seems like a strange complement for a breakfast and so I play a series I'm re-watching instead while I finish the meal with a bitter aftertaste in my mouth unrelated to the food.

After realizing creative writing was just not going anywhere—as I gathered by the still blank page that greeted me when I finally went back to my laptop—I decide to finally check all the corrections and comments my thesis advisor made on the first two chapters of my text, and now I want to rip out my eyelids because I have no idea how to explain—again—something that last time I was told was fine.

So against my will, I enter into a loop of reading and writing, and reading and writing, and reading and writing… to fix whatever I was told was still there to fix. It's not much, and yet, midday became 6 in the afternoon and I only realized because the emptiness in my stomach had settled into a sensation of nausea that would only be fixed by eating, even when the idea of consuming any kind of solid food seemed utterly revolting at the time. Still, I manged and ended up with a couple of quesadillas in front of me, and now I'm reminded of a post I once saw online along the lines of "some will never understand the relationship between a depressed girl and her quesadillas."

I decide to numb my mind for a while and as if on cue, my fingers are already opening a social media app on my phone to scroll while I eat. Not many posts go by before I see something about a new pair of Meta Glasses being advertised by celebrities and influencers and now my mind remembers some articles and books I've been revising on post-feminism and surveillance, and I think that this is something interesting enough to write about, but I'm already working on my thesis and I'm already trying to come up with a short story to write because I don't want my fiction writing skills to rot due to lack of practice, and I don't even have platform to share my writing with and the idea of pitching my non-yet-existent paper to magazines just means more steps I just don't want to deal with because now is already midnight and I barely finished fixing the first chapter of my thesis. So I upload it next to my third that still hasn't been reviewed and I sigh in relief because now I feel like I have a couple of days to focus my attention into something else.

Back in bed, I allow myself to enjoy the always-welcomed sound of the rain and decide to read at least for a little while before I'm finally knocked-out by the heaviness on my eyelids. I peruse the stacks of unread books that have taken over every corner of my room but decide comfort is more important than finishing with my ever-growing TBR list and open a questionable book about vampires and werewolves that I mostly know by heart now, and I think about how my favorite book just turned 20 years old last year, and suddenly I’m almost twice as old as the protagonist whose age seemed so far away from mine the first time I read it. There’s a strange knot in my throat and the nausea in the stomach is back even though this time I did eat before the hollow pain reminded me I needed sustenance.

At some point I realize how many of those stories make you think that growing up would be like crossing some sort of threshold and further down the line I realized I never actually felt like I came of age, but when I think about that I realize I’m still afraid of how fast the time goes by, because I feel too old and too young at the same time, I feel like I want to do a thousand things but I feel like every idea I've ever had just ends up weighting me down.

I still remember all those night in my childhood bed when I dreamed about the possible futures I'd envision for my adult life, when I bought all those idealized scenarios of being a grown up and before realizing that perhaps I should’ve studied medicine like my mother wanted because at least people would always need doctors.

I remember thinking there would be a time when I'd be full grown—when I'd feel fully grown—, when I’d be the vision of myself I'd created in my mind, I'd feel myself suddenly becoming complete and accomplished… but I didn’t. Instead, everyday still feels like a race, and you finally understand why modernity romanticized vampires so much, because we are always running out of time.