It's not about being better than anyone else. It's about being better than you used to be.

These old Arab men with faces wrinkled like ripened dates order their coffee with Equal and every packet I open lets out my mother's voice when it wasn't sharp and jagged and tearing through my ribcage. I am packing my things now, moving for the fifth time in less than a year and I'm hoping I don't become one of those nomadic business people that feels the need to uproot her family every two years to chase a managerial opportunity.

I want to know what it is with my need for novelty because I'm fucking acting like it's on the same par as shelter and food and water. I think I will be nineteen forever because I sure do act like it.

Yeah, you see me doing all of these Grown Up Things like Paying Bills and Balancing Checkbooks and Work and Play and Abstaining From Serious Drug Use and Paying Attention to My Health and Constantly Working in Some Manner or Another but you know what I really want to do is drug myself into oblivion and be promiscuous and live out of my car and just not show up to work and participate in otherwise self-destructive behaviours.

I don't want to be an adult. I never got to be a fucking reckless immature teenager with stupid self-created problems. This is my last year to hold onto the Teenager Excuse but I am too tired and jaded and responsible to do so much as buy an unnecessary article of clothing.

What the hell, I'm only nineteen and already I'm tired of living.