Ms. Darling If You're Nasty

Saturday morning, I woke up with two other people in my bed.

No, not like that. Like this: G's housemates were gone for the weekend, the house has mice. She didn't want to stay alone. She came over around 1.30 on Friday, and as we were getting into bed, girl-talking about the night, her phone rang.

"I always get nervous when the phone rings this late," she said. "What if it's an emergency?" (Note: she is a far better friend than me, the girl who routinely turns her phone to 'silent' on weekend nights, lest I be disturbed for a moment once my head hits the pillow.)

She answered. It was H. And it was an emergency, sort of. He'd left his keys in New York, his car at the airport, his credit card at the bar. His roommate was nowhere to be found, and his doorman's keys weren't working. Or something.

So he came over and the three - four, if you count Baylor at the foot of the bed - of us had an impromptu sleepover, complete with the best kind of giggles, the ones that slip out just as everyone's trying their hardest to fall asleep. It was fairly pleasant rest, considering the crowd, considering that I sleep on a queen-sized box-spring-and-mattress-on-the-floor situation. The next morning we woke up around 10, laughed about our nights, looked for socks.  It was pretty lovely. Here's the thing, though: G is 27. H and I are both 31. Baylor, though none of it was his doing, is 60-something, in dog years.

When my parents were 31, I'd already been around for a while. They'd had another kid. They'd bought and sold a house. They owned a car. They knew how to take small children on a vacation. They could balance checkbooks back when that was a thing that people literally did. (Everyone just uses the computer now, right?)

I count myself among the ranks of friends who still aren't sure what they want to do when they grow up. Who thinks about going back to school frequently - which is a perfectly fine endeavor to take on at 31, there's no age limit to learning, but it's perhaps an interesting sideways move for people who have already gone to so much school. I am frequently only able to locate one shoe of the pair. I have nothing saved. I am physically unable to leave the house at the same time every morning, I swear I see a different group of people on the bus every day. My parents still pay my cell phone bill. (Which I appreciate the hell out of, guys.)

I was running through all of this this morning - waiting for the bus, late to work as usual - and thought: what the hell happened? There are so many of us, grown children pretending at adulthood, like if you could see our inner selves we'd all be tousle-haired six-year-olds playing dress-up in our parent's closets, swallowed up in suit jackets, clomping around in Mommy's heels with lipstick drawn outside the corners of our mouths. I certainly have friends with spouses and houses and cars and babies who've arrived, or with storks on the horizon, but I am still solidly attending Camp 'A Positive Would Be A Negative'. At a certain point, it's easy to start feeling...if not 'bad', then 'less than'.

I've commented on it before, this generational dilemma: the path of our myriad opportunities led us right to a post-adolescent inertia. In the face of so much everything, you pick nothing. Or one thing, but only for a minute, because there are so many other things! My parents didn't have the same options: they had to do something, so they just did it. Is there a sort of freedom in that? Or is this just another freedom that I'm not appreciating: this ability to do what I want, when I want, to still have all these options on the table. Is that 'less than' feeling just the product of a little fear, a little nervousness, because there's no real template for this kind of life? What you were 'supposed to do' was, for so long, really what you 'had to do'. So of course that's the Normal. But now...

There don't seem to be immediate answers to a lot of my questions. Which makes me think maybe it's not about answers, maybe it's more about perspectives, and enjoying all the things you do have, and forgetting for a minute about all the things you should have done.

On Sunday morning, G and I were in her kitchen, making egg scrambles and mimosas, dodging new mousetraps, when she said: "I would think some people would actually be jealous of our lives." I popped a piece of avocado in my mouth, she stirred the egg whites. The bird squawked from his perch, Baylor sniffed at my feet for dropped morsels of goat cheese. Outside it was beautiful, blue skies and fall sunlight warming treetops that have just started to turn orange.

"You know?" She asked. "Because this is so much fun?"

And she's right about that much: this has been so much fun.