Using ideas as my maps, “We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I.

I'll be eighteen in a few months. I don't feel like I should be eighteen; in fact, I hardly feel like I should be seventeen. Most days I'm not sure whether I should be six years old or sixty. It's an odd thing. I wonder what it's like to feel your own age? I feel like I grew up strangely prematurely - I have a theory that the youngest child will do one of two things. Either you'll be babied and thus be a baby the rest of your life, or (as in my case), if you are close to your older siblings and don't want to be left behind, you simply grow up when they do. Sometimes I feel that I was cheated out of something on that score, that there was some precious stage of childhood that I skipped over completely. But then again, I have never been good at waiting patiently. I taught myself to read at the age of three because Mom was taking too long teaching Kate. I've always felt older than the other people my age. But even with that, I sometimes am overcome with a strange fear that makes me want to shrink, or hide in a corner, or sit and allow myself to be held for awhile. Fear of what, I couldn't say - decisions, people, the world, maybe. And then I feel like a child; only, I'm supposed to be past that by now, aren't I? Life should fit into three neatly defined stages: Childhood and Adulthood, with the Teen years in-between. But somehow, I seem to have skipped that in-between stage, and am now bouncing between one extreme and the other. I ought to land on one of them sometime...

Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.