It's that age. The age of double takes. The age of being in between. The age where daily life is so confusing that Alice in Wonderland makes sense. The age when jobs are needed but few, where friends are married and names change and people we thought we knew aren't the same. The age where life should be starting but instead the world has become a box even the greatest magician can't escape from. The age of discouragement. Rejection.
Twenty-two. It's a terrible age.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if God just skipped this age? You know, like how Louis Sachar skipped the nineteenth story because there is no nineteenth story in Wayside School? The floors went directly from eighteen to twenty. Even in the sequel the skipped story became a place where the work was impossible, like memorizing the dictionary from beginning to end and no matter how badly you wanted out there was no escape. It sounds exactly like being twenty-two. If Mr. Sachar's book could be interpreted as a sort of life story, perhaps he chose to skip the nineteenth story because the story of his nineteenth year was one he wishes to forget. I'm making that up, but what if? Had I story I wished to skip it would be the twenty-second. If wrote a book with that many chapters twenty-two would be missing. It's an unlucky number.
It seems that whatever is looked forward to the most either turns out to be one hundred times better or one hundred times worse that we thought it would be.
I remember going to Washington D.C. in the eighth grade. I was so excited even if I was rooming with three girls I barely knew, and during the trip we played on the statue of some man's half buried body, added chewing gum to the gum tree outside of Ford Theater, ate chicken every day, the toilet broke, and I got sick the last night we were there. Not to mention the typical thirteen year old drama.
My senior year of high school I couldn't wait for band camp because finally, after years of torture, I would be on top. It came, and the second to last day I found out my cousin died and I went home to a funeral.
When I hit college I couldn't wait until I turned twenty. Finally I wouldn't be a teenager. I love the Anne of Green Gables books and in Anne of the Island she talks about how when she was younger twenty seemed like such a ripe old age. This, of course, totally makes sense because somehow it sounds more mature when you can say "I'm twenty" as opposed to "I'm nineteen". There's really a huge gap between the two.
Twenty wasn't my favorite age either.
I turned twenty-one and the day after my birthday I accidentally stabbed myself in the hand with my pocket knife and fainted. I had to skip church and spent the day in bed. I still have the scar. In fact, so far, the twenties have revealed themselves to be completely horrendous minus one or two minor things. You know, like marriage. Or having children (eventually). Or actually finding a good job. Or finally graduating from college and realizing you'll never be tortured by school again. But what do those matter, really, when confronted with other much bigger things?
Really, though, when it comes down to it what good does it do to complain? Living on earth means that life won't always be wonderful and perfect and it's something we eventually get used to, like moving to a new place or finding out you can't have chocolate anymore. So in the end the moral to the story is, things will happen that you can't stop but dwelling on it won't change what has happened. Silver lining, kids. We only live on this earth once.
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