(We are the reckless, we are the wild youth.)

25.

25.

I’m 25.

I’m 25 for 6 months and 3 more days.

Yet I keep telling people I’m 26. I’m not sure why. I should be embracing the younger age right now. I’m on the downhill slope of my 20’s, careening toward my 30’s. (I hate to ski and I hate skiing metaphors even more.)

One of the first things I realized when I became single again was that this will be it, these are the final years I can enjoy being truly ‘young.’ Of course I only realized this after I’d gone through 88 boxes of tissues and shed 25 lbs from malnutrition. I smartened up though and thanked God I came out of the relationship with as little baggage as possible. It’s not like I had a kid hanging off my arm because we’d gone our separate ways. I was just as free as I’d been when we first got together.

The realization I came to is true though. I know that when you get older people tell you that you’re young at heart but that’s not really the same thing, is it? When you’re old, you’re old, your body and mind give you away. You remember things that those younger than you don’t and you forget things that you should really remember. Hair gets thinner, thighs get bigger and the signs of wrinkles start showing up everywhere. So really the people that say that are just placating the older ages, which allows them to hang onto their drunken nights probably a little longer than they should.

You know how job interviews will ask where you see yourself in five years? Well I see myself done school, holding a steady job that I enjoy and hopefully bringing in a bigger paycheck that in turn will make my savings account a bit larger, but besides all of that adult stuff I want to have a young life that was lived.

I want another tattoo, I want to live somewhere completely out of my comfort zone, and I want to wear a strapless dress and not worry about my ‘man arms’.

I don’t want to care about buying area rugs, or have a certain day of the week I go grocery shopping and I’m certainly not ready to give up the somewhat thin-ish stomach I still have.

I’m not ready to be called ‘Mom’, I like having to do my laundry only once a month and I don’t want to keep vegetables in my apartment yet.

I want to be able to go visit my best friend in NYC on a whim, staying out until 4 a.m., I’ve probably got a couple more first kisses in me before I reach my last, and I’m not ready to store all my boxes of photos from high school in a dusty garage, never to be seen again.

I always felt unfinished when I was with him and now I know why, I’m not quite done living yet.