Am I really Eighteen?

It's dark out. I'm at my dining room table, surrounded by brightly-colored balloons taped to the walls, the game of Risk across from me and a twenty-four pack of Arizona Iced Tea at my feet.

I turned eighteen an hour ago.

It's funny how the number that you've spent a whole year of your life coming to know and love simply disappears in one second, and the number that you've never really liked at all replaces it.

Eighteen. It sounds german. The German language always felt imposing to me-- a language only sausage makers or world tyrants would speak.
I don't want to be a sausage maker. And I know I'm not cut out to be a world tyrant. I can't even win a game of Risk.

When I was fifteen I was told that the day I turned eighteen would be the day that I become a grown up.
At this moment I can only say one thing:

I hope they're wrong.

I like video games. My room is still messy. My parents wake me up every morning for school and my mom still makes my lunch. My socks rarely match and I don't cook my own food. I would rather play my guitar than discuss politics or solve the world's problems. And I much better prefer walking around without a shirt on than suiting up for an interview.

In short, I am eighteen and not an inch of me is different. I'm a grown up, but I refuse to be.

When I was younger, teachers sometimes asked me if I was content with being irresponsible and juvenile.
Though not once have I told them so, I think now that I look back on it, I would answer them with a smile "Yes."

You only get to be irresponsibly juvenile once. Then it's over. Then, you're a grown up.

I don't want to be a grown up.

I feel like seventeen years of my life never even happened. It's all just data in my brain that somebody, maybe God, planted there. I feel like I have just been born and nothing makes sense and I don't want it to.

I know in years to come I will go to college, get a job, marry perhaps, buy a house, get a dog, have some kids, go on vacations to Mozambique, look back on my life with one last sigh, and then die. I feel like this will all happen because my body and time and the universe and God all decided on the same day, February the seventh, 2010, that Isaac should give up on his childish life and grow up and do some grown up things.

Age is not fair. I wish I was not so bitter about things.