Over the past few years, I've run into a few nuggets of life that make me realize I'm growing up. They're not the big, obvious things -- living alone, financial independence, student loan payments. Those actually don't make me feel any more like an adult, because I pay my bills solely so I can have a space to continue living near my children-at-heart buddies, eat drugs and fingerpaint in the garage at 4am, and generally do whatever the hell I fucking want to.
That's not being an adult to me -- that's earning the freedom to remain a child, and it's damn beautiful.
The last time I encountered an adult moment was a few years ago, when I realized I knew the meaning of the phrase, "refinancing the house," which had been a mystery to me as a kid. No one ever told me what it meant, but somehow I woke up one day and realized I had learned what it was somewhere along the line. That was more proof of my imminent adulthood than signing a lease on my one-bedroom apartment was.
Over the past few months, Josh and I have been living a dream we've both wanted on some level, for a very long time. We both have a tendency to put ourselves in risky situations -- not without forethought, but we both have fairly loud "yes" attitudes toward most opportunities for life experiences. We jump off every cliff that might have something interesting waiting at the bottom, and we both seem to do it for the same reasons: self-gratification, the desire to be intellectually engaged at all times, and an insatiable passion for learning shit. He's traveled to parts of the world I've dreamed about, and I've scaled social and mental mountains that he didn't know existed in this part of the world. They're all cliffs, and we want to jump from every single one.
We were talking the other day when he revealed this really adulty train of thought: when a potentially dangerous situation comes up in his life, he doesn't only weigh it in terms of self-preservation anymore -- in different words, he told me that he drives home carefully not only so he doesn't die, but also because he'll be able to continue living his life with me.
It's the adult layer of self-preservation, and I have it now, too.
We don't have kids, and we're not legally obligated to each other. I'm not legally responsible for any debts he might have, and I wouldn't have to pay for funeral expenses if he...God, that makes me ill to think about...if something happened to him. It's not about burdens of any kind. And to this point, at least in my life (and I could probably say this about his experience, too), relationships have always hit a point where the lifted feeling of love turns into the weight of a burden; where the first thing I think about upon waking is the list of things I have to do that day, and not how fucking thrilled I am to be waking up next to this person in my bed. Where a lover's daily habits turn into the most annoying mountain I've ever climbed. Where I have to wait for him to drive away before I can cut the lifeline to reality and dig around inside my own head. Where I am not freed by him, but rather I am freed by his absence.
This is the first time I've ever dated someone for over two months without having the first links of those chains form around my wrists. For most of this year, I've woken up with nothing else on my mind but how fucking thrilled I am that this person is in my bed. Every morning.
And because of that, every time I get behind the wheel after I've had even two drinks, I think about how in love I am with him -- and my life with him -- and I drive more carefully than is probably necessary. It is more than just a survival mechanism. In fact, it now precedes the notion of self-preservation. My thoughts skip the immediate moment and land on the next morning, when I will somehow love my life more than I did the day before. And behind the wheel, all I can think about is how badly I want that moment in the future; all those millions of moments in the future.
And sure, if I die in an accident, I won't feel like I missed anything -- I won't feel anything at all, because I'm dead -- but being alive, thinking about the awe of being alive as he sleeps next to me, is enough to make me dread the moment I don't feel anything. Likewise, on the other hand: if God does exist, and He takes me before the one I love, it would be just as painful to watch the rest of his life without me as it would be for him to live it.
Moment of Adulthood #523 (a):When I realized that my primal survival instinct left the Dark Ages because of how much I love another human being.
Moment of Adulthood #523 (b): When the concept of an afterlife, whether I believe in one or not, became irrelevant.
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