Twenty

8/31/24, 9/7/24

Twenty, to me, is an existential series. A television set to see your friends make your heart just to break it back again. Twenty breeds a need for on-site therapy. Some find it in themselves. Some project it on the other. Some drink it down their throat or pray it away. Some choose hate in place of the lonely love they’ll never learn to take. Twenty is a pig-sty with guys who begin to realize lies are a currency to spend in place of mistakes we’ve made. Twenty is twelve hours in bed, conjuring a guilt with a hand over my thighs, picking hairs to fill a hole we think is abandoned, but really misplaced, waiting to be traced three years down the line that says a job, a joint, a love, and the point of life is to just keep breathing to a cadence of transparence we dedicate in derogatory hate to the boys, babes, and bitches who present better than us. Twenty is a board game with cake. An awkward smile and a fake in the bar across the room lies an ex’s face that breeds the long, lost empathetic days occurring now, instead of euphoric college saints made for WASPs to feel as if they’d ever belong. Twenty is long walks down alleyway’d halls, through a head-high rush of nihilistic thought: what can be me, unburdened by what I have been? Twenty is protein, coffee, and creatine. Twenty is the look on your face when you smile at the sight of all the life coming back into me. Twenty is a beautiful mistake just waiting to happen. Twenty is Sabrina Carpenter in a toupee doing pilates with the middle school scars on my thighs stretching to keep my chest upright with whole-food greenery pesticides the mamacita clauses of 1835 predict the forces of life choose talent on the scale of work-based luck. Twenty is self-centered children too busy to find themselves to help you cry about them. A plea for identity, the loss of charity. A ball of luxury. A wet dream wake for the babies we long to never make. Twenty is just an age. A life sentence. A repeated mistake. A wonderful mistake. Twenty, like everything, is beyond words, but I’m so happy
it happened to me.