This week, I turned twenty. I didn't think much of it. Everyone kept emphasizing how I was no longer a teenager, officially no longer attached to childhood, but I just thought about how much better twenty-one sounded. But then I was hit with nostalgia, and the ringing sound of people saying "welcome to your 20s." How interesting that sounds, the concept of starting a new decade.
My friends played a playlist of songs that came out when I was 10, one decade ago. I remember 10 well—the completion of your age on all fingers. I wrote songs and blasted Taylor Swift and embraced a new bedroom with lime green walls covered in song lyrics I wrote in sharpie. I was wildly outgoing, an intense thinker and sometimes so caught up in my day dreams I lacked touch with reality. In many aspects, not much has changed.
I walked down the streets of Boston, taking in all of the sights and sounds. I looked at my friends with their backpacks full of cheap beer. Suddenly, I became flushed with the fact that someday this will not be real. The stained red couch in the boy's apartment that we've spent countless hours laughing and numbing our minds on will be a blissful memory. There will be no packed basements in Allston listening to Berklee bands play and complaining about the $5 cover charge. There will be no walking into an apartment full of friends doing their eyeshadow and choking down shots of tequila. There will be a time where my friends won't be a block away and my biggest requirements won't be to create music.
For some reason, all of this hit me when I turned twenty. My times of 1 a.m. pizza runs and spontaneous explorations of the city I've come to love will one day be a memory I look back on. What a strange time to be in; how do I acknowledge the wonderful simplicity of it all? How do I not take for granted the 9 a.m. Harmony classes and the $10 it costs to see my friend's show? How do I appreciate scrapping together quarters to do laundry and one dollar bills to send my friend with the fake ID to the liquor store? College is fucking tough, but there will never be such a youthful time as now.
My friends are going in different directions all over the world. This time will never be the same. Time is ever changing. I'm no longer writing on my walls or pretending to stay after school for chemistry when actually hanging out with friends or sneaking vodka into my friend's basement while their parents are out of town. Right now, I'm twenty. I'm in a small apartment in the heart of Boston, complaining when the T breaks down or when I have to record a four part song in Dorian. Take a deep breath and appreciate the cold concrete of your friend's stoop and the run to class in sweatpants. One day, this won't be real.
