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Why do you always feel like you’ve been abandoned on the side of the road?Time passes before your eyes at breakneck speed, and you stare at your feet, glued to the sidewalk between two old chewing-gums and a crushed can, thinking that someone will eventually push you into the thick of it. Everything goes by you a little too quickly. You’ve had just enough time to go to bed, yet your alarm clock is already blaring in your ears. Winter has barely begun but you can already feel the sticky summer heat lick your fingertips. You were seventeen yesterday and the world was at your feet, and now you’re fumbling forward without really knowing where to go. You’re twenty-seven, stuck with an unshakeable impression that you’ve run out of time, that you’ve missed your calling, that you’ve let yourself slack off a little too long. All that’s left is a heart that’s been broken and put back together with a lot of duct tape, a mouth full of witty remarks and a panic-stricken kid in the hollow of your ribcage.

You reread the same sad, rebellious teenage books you did ten years ago, and you dream up the same stories you did when you were seven. It’s just become heavier, more mechanical, living with the weight of the years. You can’t ignore the whispers in the corridors, the rustles behind your back and above your head, the muffled footsteps of a life that seems to pass you by. Everyone else seems to be moving forward, head held high and chin proud, but you’re just standing there, an eternal new beginning caught between two unpleasant e-mails.

And yet you were in such a hurry to grow up. First, you wanted to be seven, ushering your own age of reason. You wanted to become wise, almost an adult, to sit at the grown-up’s table, at last. It looked simple enough to you, and it was. You played Pokemon without worrying too much about your team’s stats (which is probably why you never got past the third arena), drank blackberry squash and ran around a lot. Your bright yellow bike had a blue shark drawn on it, and you were doing your best to learn how to ride it without training wheels. You’d make up crazy stories in the playground, your stomach full of sugar and acid from the sweets you bought at the local bakery.

The sun warmed the corner of your head without burning you. The only thing you were afraid of was the neighbour’s big dog, then one day you never saw him again. Your existence took on its full meaning in the middle of those endless summer months spent splashing your feet in the cool river, your hands covered in bramble scratches. You’d roll around in the fields pretending you weren’t allergic to everything around you, only to be scolded afterwards, your skin stinging and your eyes swollen. You were sensible, fresh, drunk with laughter and involuntary naps on the sofa.

You weren’t so keen when you turned seventeen. You just wanted to get away from the hubbub of life. The choices were piling up a bit too quickly and you didn’t have time to do anything anymore. You were a bit too wise, a bit too absent-minded, a bit too out of place everywhere you went. You’d waited a long time to be a teenager; you didn’t think it would be this bitter. With your head too high up in the clouds for a class of high schoolers in a hurry to become real adults, you wanted to hide as far away as possible. The world had turned into an endless Thursday, a Thursday where you forgot your umbrella as heavy, icy rain fell in the grey streets. You sought refuge in the high-pitched voices of exalted singers, lulled to sleep by the hum of the school bus that ate up the road beneath your seat, your face trembling against the window. You dreamt of a place that would never exist, somewhere where you could be saved from all of this.

And something forbidden, something out of place, was always tickling your taste buds. Those butterflies in the back of your stomach that you didn’t want to admit to yourself. That mirror that didn’t really recognise you. So you rehashed all your words of the day, adjusting your bag so that no one realised you’re a little too different, a little too singular, a little too rainbow-ish. You stayed silent for too long. You held back. You censored yourself. Above all, you didn’t make waves, you didn’t stand out. Above all, you stayed in this austere mould. Above all, you didn’t want to be yourself. Didn’t want to be.

All of this seems like it happened a long time ago, and feels maybe a bit ridiculous today. You’re twenty-seven going on twenty-eight, and you feel like you’ve hung on too long to this Peter-pan desire to stay a kid. Everyone around you has grown up too fast, has plans and ambitions, and you’re still telling stories that are almost funny, almost sad. You try not to think about it too much.

You’re still taking poorly framed photos on slightly rubbish phones; the pixels are missing, and so is the unstable T9 keyboard. Your tongue still runs over the enamel of your teeth, looking for mechanical bumps; you may no longer have braces and a slightly straighter smile, but you can still feel the burning red of your cheeks when people used to make fun of your metallic fangs. Faded antiseptic stings your rubber knees, the glue from the colourful bandages still itching from when you fell in the gravel. You used to bite your fingernails until they bled, now you just pull the skin around them so it doesn’t show as much. Your jaws are stiff from years of clenching, and you still feel like you’ve got too many teeth in your mouth, like you can never breathe deep enough, like your heart beats just a tad too fast. Your palms bear the marks of your fingernails from when you were desperate to keep quiet, and the bags under your eyes are no less heavy than before; every day, the world crumbles a little more around you and you force yourself to choke on its dust, its rubble, its pollution.

And you feel so lost, so alienated from yourself; you’re running around, all the time, chasing after ifs, maybes, whens and whys. You’re out of breath, why do you keep going, why do you keep persisting? What’s the point of all this?

Time goes by, so slowly.

Of course you don’t know where you’re going. Maybe you’ll never really know. Maybe nobody knows, after all. But sometimes you just exist. You find yourself in the taste of a cup of coffee that’s too bitter and in the sun that stretches out in strange shapes at the end of the day. In the uncontrolled bursts of laughter in the middle of the night, at the dinner table or on the edge of a terrace. You feel the wind biting your cheeks in winter, alone with yourself in the unpolished night. The blue sky stretches out before you as you look up from the pavement: it’s for you, too vast, too empty, but for you all the same. You finally get your head above water and laugh, teeth straight and chin almost up. That’s the only thing that matters, after all.