I ain’t old.

Is it karma? My sister when I moved in with her my junior year in high school dated the worse loser. He never paid his rent. He often refused to work. My sister refused to kick him out. I had to tell her that he tried to suck my dick as I got out of the shower. He didn’t do that, she didn’t believe me, but in good faith she kicked him out. She never forgave me. I thought I did her a favor. That guy was a loser. We constantly got into fights. I was so arrogant, President of Student council and say no to drugs with a broom stuck up my ass. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t work. I couldn’t understand how a grown man only wanted to get high and drunk. I told myself I was never going to grow up and be nothing like that loser.

Over ten years later, I woke up in the middle of the afternoon on my bedroom floor. I immediately felt something wet. I hoped it was it was that my water bottle fell in the bed and not that I pissed on myself. Thank god it was water. I decided that I was hungry. I gathered enough strength to walk the three blocks to Wendy’s.

My birthday is coming up again in a week. I don’t really care for counting days until I die. I like to look at my life in eras. There was my arrival era, had to get the world ready for my existence. There was the bratty kid era. I got a beating everyday during those years. There was the rebel without a cause years that lasted from being a runaway until I graduated college. There was my holy than thou era when I was a reborn Christian. There was the corporate America era when I quickly realized I had no desire to climb the ladder. And next came the unemployment era which I’m still testing out.

I was walking down the street when I ran into a group of teenagers. I don’t like teenagers in groups because they just look like they are up to no good. They were singing real loud a Lil Wayne song. When they approached me they stopped. One of them smoking a cigarette immediately threw it to the ground. They looked petrified. One of the young boys said, Sorry sir, we didn’t mean to be disrespectful.” I was like, who the hell are you calling sir bitch, I’m only 31 years old.

I felt old. Real old. I couldn’t understand why they would assume I was an adult. I hadn’t agreed to that insanity. I immediately thought of my sister’s old boyfriend. I wonder if I had judged him too harshly. I grew up to be a grown man who just wanted to drink and not work. But to those kids, I looked like an adult. I was old enough to be one of their fathers if I had them in middle school. I wanted to run after them and tell them it was all a lie. That growing up is all a lie. I wanted to show them my ipod and I had Lil Wayne on my playlist. I wanted to buy some weed from one of them.

But I didn’t run after those crazy kids. They would’ve just thought of me as some old crazy drunk and called the cops.