All Grown Up

All Grown Up Written and illustrated by Kelsey Ward

I stepped out into the evening air, a sharp contrast to the syrupy heat of the house. The night breeze biting my exposed ears like a playful kitten. Weather in the outskirts of Los Angeles county was mild, even in the dead of winter. I hadn’t snuck out of my parents’ house since high school. I guess that's why I felt like a teenager again, but tonight I wasn’t on my way to illicit activities.

Tonight, I was out because I couldn’t sleep. When I was small, I could never sleep on Christmas eve, and in that way tonight felt like the olds days. The biggest difference was that my insomnia wasn’t as much of an occasion lately. What was new tonight was the silent whisper in my bones that beckoned me outdoors.

I looked down the street in both directions. The neighborhood was mostly familiar, just with a few new coats of paint. For how badly I had wanted to leave the suburbs years ago, I strangely found myself appreciating them now. I rarely left my shoe-box-sized city apartment on foot after sundown, and when I did it didn’t feel like this. Here there was no aroma of ripe garbage or fermented urine, no suspicious strangers. The streets were empty, save for myself.

I stretched as if waking from a long nap and set out through the maze of quaint uniformity, making my way to the park, but found myself weaving an unintentionally circuitous route. It slowly dawned on me that I had forgotten where the park was. In a last ditch effort I went back to the main road and let it lead me, to my relief, there at last.

I had to climb a chain link fence that I could have sworn wasn’t there when I was young. I knew I risked some kind of trouble by being here, but an intangible magnetism drew me in. I perched myself on a squealing swing, to my unfamiliar discomfort, my legs settled tightly bent against the ground. It didn’t feel right, but I needed to be here. I wasn't sure why.

My fathers voice from earlier that evening echoed in my head. Poets and Writers Coalition Winter 2022

This new job you’re doing, the promotion. This is the reason you do it. It’s the real deal. You’ve made it, you know. You should be proud of yourself, son.

But it didn’t feel like the real deal. Hell, I hardly felt real most days. I had been coasting, scraping by. One of the several hues of my life I had long since given up talking about after a few repeat lectures on determination, “grit”, work ethic, and “growing up”. So I went jumping from one thing to another in hopes that doing more might make me feel like I was more. And when I came home I gave the family broad strokes, the highlights only. Yet, I was one bad afternoon away from it crumbling down around me. One morning meeting away from leaving my phone at home, driving my car up the interstate till it ran out of gas, and sitting there waiting for a good samaritan to kindly helped me push it into the nearest ditch.

I had hoped that hearing his appreciation of all that I did would make me feel new again, and bring us closer. At the very least I had hoped it would make me feel a shred of content inside. Tonight at dinner when he said those words, all I could manage to find inside me was a growing sourness in the pit of my stomach and sharp words I strained to contain behind my teeth.