Getting Old
Getting older doesn’t come all at once. It hits in waves—a word, a gesture, a sudden feeling. It’s shitty.
At Silvi’s seventeenth birthday, packed into someone’s apartment with Rihanna on loop and someone’s dad pushing sausages on everyone, I watched my friend work the room. He was charming, cocky, just pushy enough. And it was working. That’s how it used to work for me.
That’s when I felt it. I’m too old for this.
Not just the party. All of it. The girls, the approach, the whole mechanism. And it was both sad and freeing because I’d loved it. A couple years back I could show up anywhere, see someone I wanted, and something would happen. I could rely on that. Now it doesn’t work. Either I’ve become someone people don’t want to find at a party, or I just don’t need it the same way anymore.
I think I’m done with casual. I want something real, something worth building. Teenagers aren’t ready for that—thank God. Something in me is closing off right now, moving to a different place. This feels like the best time in my life to start something. Berlin helps with that feeling. Everything still feels possible.
But I’m lying to myself and I know it. There’s no clean switch from fooling around to something serious. Maybe that’s backwards—maybe something real only grows out of messing around, seeing what sticks. I don’t know. I’m stuck between believing my life is starting and watching it get smaller.